last daze in NZ

Whoa, I haven't logged on here for a couple of days and so much happened between the last log entry and now. I'll try and fill in the blanks. At the moment I'm sitting in a laundromat in Vancouver washing all the NZ mud and sand out of my clothes trying to think of what is important to log and what is not. I've read a lot of other peoples published journals and some blogs but it escapes me as to what should be "tossed out there" for all to know.

Saturday started off sunny and breezy so I spent the afternoon trying to get ready for another test flight of the Night kite later on in between all the SCANZ symposium presentations in the afternoon. It was nice to see a few new folks out for the symposium. I was sort of feeling like I might not have another chance to fly the kite so I enlisted Lylli Sue to come out out to the beach at sunset to operate the video camera. I wanted some documentation of the kite in flight and was hoping to get some shots for a video commission I have to get done by the end of the summer. The sunset was beautiful as a back drop, the surf was beautiful crashing and swelling, and the first kite flight was great. The wind was a little too gusty for the Huia sound payload again though but I was still hoping to get it all happening. Then..oh no! .. the kite crashed in the water. As I set out to retrieve it I was thinking that this was the end as the kite line was almost all the way out when it went down. I walked out on the rocks to the water line( the tide was out) and started pulling the line in slowly hoping it wouldn't break. As the kite came closer to my position I could see that the blue LEDS were still lit! The lights twinkled under the water and as the kite came closer it was looking like some kind of electric underwater creature. I sort of felt then like a fisherman in some mythic story hooking a magic creature. I slowly lifted the kite out of the water looking for damage and the wind grabbed it. As the water ran off, it slowly righted itself and lifted back into the sky! What a sight! I looked back at Lylli Sue hoping that the video was still rolling and carried on flying it. As the evening wore on, the kite crashed four more times in the water with me carrying out the same sequence of events several times over.



Sunday was spent with trying to repair the damage from the last nights final crash in hopes that the wind would come up for the evenings planned dinner, a Maori style dinner celebration with food cooked over hot stones buried in the ground. We all bussed over to a farm for the dinner watching Mt. Taranaki glow in the orange sunset. The wind didn't come up and I found before we left that I had made an error in my repairs so the kite would not have flown properly anyway, much to the chagrin of the Taranaki Daily News photographer who came out to the farm for a kite photo op. The news people seemed to be obsessed with getting a picture of the kite, but I had been dodging them all week after the first run in with them. I wasn't very keen on letting them misrepresent my work again and as the kite project is a work in progress, didn't want it to be publicized as such.



Monday was consumed with getting ready to leave New Plymouth, but I found that my flight out was not until late Tuesday evening. So I had more time to hang out, shop a bit and look around. I got lucky with another nice sunset and went out with Gillian and Justin to try and get some more shots. I had discovered after viewing the video footage that I could sort of piece together a narrative for the video and get some establishing shots for cutaways and such during the editing. There was no wind and the light was quite different. The tide was still in too. Everything was different so getting some simple shots turned difficult. Yikes... I finally got my boots soaked through and wet sand all over everything.

Tuesday I went to see the SCANZ exhibition at the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth. What a great exhibition! And wow.. Some folks even showed the work they were doing at SCANZ. It was great to see the end results of so much hard work. Thanks!