Waihou Wanderings

G'day!

Went out for a wander along the Waihou river today to have a stab at some trout. The part of the Waihou that I went to is halfway between Tirau and Putaruru, just off SH28 [http://www.topomap.co.nz/NZTopoMap?v=2&ll=-38.020341,175.813967&z=15 ]. All of the trout I saw were well under the legal 30cm size though, as the larger trout have moved down river to the mouths. I did have a crack at a few groups of them, but only managed to catch tree branches and river weed. Classic.

It was a sweet spot though. The river is spring-fed, which explains the crystal clear blue water. Waihou means 'new water' in maori, which is fitting. 

Here are a couple of my favourite pictures from the trip!
(I took some of the pictures through my polaroids to cut the glare off the water, so I've had to play with the colours on some of them to get them looking normal again)

How do trout get up these!?

One of the locals- spot the trout.

"Beautiful things don't ask for attention" - James Thurber

Cheers for looking!

Pinnacles Reconnaissance Mission

Just a quick update!

As I commented on the post below, I went on a quick recon walk out to the pinnacles hut today. It's a bit of a highway of a track- a far cry from the usual bush-bashing efforts I'm used to from Canterbury excursions. It ended up being a pretty relaxed effort for David and I- a leisurely 5 hour return trip with stops a-plenty. I was keen to sus the track out to see if it would be appropriate for an early new year time mission for a few of us keen on carrying up boxes of beer and having a good time at the hut (the hut is an 80-bunk mansion!). Initial impressions are good! Just so long as no one dies trying to heave a 24-slab up the stone staircase, we should be good to go.

The pinnacles walk is half an hour northeast of Thames on the Coromandel Peninsula. It starts at 160m elevation and rises to 600m over an infamous 2km stair stretch. The stairs are, in parts, chiseled out of the stone slabs making up the hillside. They were made by the pioneering loggers in the early 1900's for access into the kauri rich area. Some historic kauri dams still stand, which were used to flush the logs down valley after felling. 

Anyway.. photos! (maybe more to be added later from David's dropbox)

[Link to topo map location: http://www.topomap.co.nz/NZTopoMap?v=2&ll=-37.04254,175.712172&z=15 ]

The start of the staircase

That tall section is a cooled magma chamber- mountain eroding away from it.

Panorama 1

Panorama 2

Panorama 3

Manuka in full bloom- small stream.

Christmas Through to New Year

Hi all, it's been a while!

Through the last few months life has been pretty much the same- the long study grind up until exams. Of course, the urge to procrastinate often got the better of Pondy and I- the result of which was that we have finally found a sweet river fishing spot! On one particular outing I managed to hook up on, and then lose, a nice ~5lb brown. Would have been my first on fly tackle too... a fight to be continued.

On the same outing I half-taught Coral how to cast fly line- she did really well! We should have a huge fly fishing squadron in no time.

Having been home for a few weeks now I haven't really achieved very much. Francis is taking a summer school uni paper and every one of my other mates has a REAL job. Thoroughly disappointing. I've been doing landscaping work with Francis' dad in the meantime.

The one major break from work was a trip up to Auckland for a concert called OUR:HOUSE. I went up with Richard and David, meeting Lachy, Cat, Jacob and Dianne at Jake and Dianne's place for pre-match. Skrillex, Steve Aoki, What So Not and MK were headlining. Turned out to be another mean gig, building well on last year's effort.

Looking forward to Christmas time- going to be having a relaxed bbq with the Schaares, then a couple of days later heading over to Roto-Vegas for the Peters do. I've booked in a fly fishing sesh with the cuzzie in Vegas which I'm really looking forward to.

I'm also planning a tramp to the pinnacles hut, up in the Coromandel. It goes through what used to be old kauri forest, with the remains of log dams still sitting in some of the valleys from pioneering foresters in the '20s. 

The hills for which the area is named. (newzealand.com)

I'll likely be having a crack at it in the new year, when I'm not so busy. Hopefully will manage to get a couple of cool pictures!



Cheers for reading!
- Russell.

Build a Bridge and Get Over It

It's been ages since I've posted! Better remedy the situation.

I'm just coming to the end of my holidays now. For the last few weeks before the break we were flat out designing and building bridges as a part of a structural engineering design paper I'm taking. It was made pretty clear early on that our design- a 'lenticular truss'- was going to be a bit tricky to do accurate calc's for. We were only allowed to use thin MDF gussets (100 x 100 x 3mm) and MDF strips (25 x 9 x 2400mm), and a bloody liberal amount of PVA glue too. We sussed it all out anyway, and built this:

Which soon became this:

... A pretty good result! They had a scoring equation for which you earned the maximum points if your bridge failed when the third guy got to the middle (due to max moment, rather than a shearing failure at either end). They added some points if it failed where you thought it would and if it was a tensile failure, or something. Completely missed out on those.

The weekend before the testing I managed to get out for a fish! (finally). We put the call out on the FishSoc facebook page and got a carload of us going out to lake Coleridge. The crew was myself, Beky, Ben, Bosley, and Berry. It was a ripper day, with a dusting of snow on some of the higher surrounding mountains-the fresh melt water from them didn't do anything good to the lake temperature; wading in the swanny and stubbies definitely highlighted the value in neoprene waders.

We walked in from where the metal road turned into a boggy 4WD track (the poor corolla was battling) and initially fished a drop off where a small tributary joined the lake. After an hour or two Pondy had some luck fishing the eddies out deep and ended his trout-drought with a very nice 5lb rainbow.

Looking back up towards the tributary

Having exhausted our luck in that spot, we moved on down to the western end of the lake where a much larger river flows into the lake, hoping to find a strong spawning spot. We had no luck here and quickly retired back to Becky's camp site for a hot cup of tea.

During my last week of holidays I've been back up to Hamilton which was awesome- great to the the olds again! And this weekend just been I cruised down to Napier for Pondy's 21st which was mint. No doubt there will be more incriminating photos surfacing in the next wee while.

Hoping to tee up an excursion this week to make the most of my freedom! Back into it next week.

That's all for now!

Mt Hutt Hustle

Scott, Cam and I were waiting for a bit of a dump of snow before last weekend to make a trip to Hutt feasible. We got it too- during Saturday there was 30cm of fresh powder laid down. So, naturally, we left early Sunday morning.

The corolla charged hard up the Mt, leaving many an Audi Q7 in our wake. Some early cloud burned off within half an hour to reveal a spectacular view of the west coast ranges in their winter coats. The first few runs were amazing- cutting tracks in powder and finding my way around the field. I've never been snowboarding at Mt Hutt field, or in proper powder before, so it was 100% novelty! We spent the day going a bit faster than we should've and bailing heaps; I think we nailed it. Scott had his GoPro mounted on his helmet and managed to catch a bit of the carnage. We pulled out some of the good/funny bits out and made a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HMGBibiY-0) so hopefully you can all have a chuckle at our expense (btw I'm the boarder in the Waikato beanie, orange coat, blue pants).

I'd love to get up again this weekend- apparently Mt Lyford is mean as at the moment- but my wallet has other plans... :(

In other adventure-related news, Pondy and I are planning a trip out to lake Coleridge to have a crack at some inland trout/ salmon, so that should be sweet! Might even make it the first official FishSoc outing.

I'll keep ya posted!

The Queenstown Prowl

We've just started up uni again after having a couple of weeks off. Through the first week of our holidays a friend and I had planned to go for an overnight tramp - the tramp I outlined in a previous post - over Tuesday/Wednesday. He gave me a call on Monday to cancel, as he had to fill in for a lady at work that had a serious issue and had to boost to hospital. 'No worries!' I thought. I checked the rain radars and decided to put the tramp back to Wednesday/Thursday and go by myself. I got all of the gear together, and procured an emergency beacon from Hunting and Fishing the day before. I had printed maps and told people exactly what my plan was etc etc- chomping at the bit to get out by myself for a couple of days.

I took off on Wednesday morning to fine weather in Christchurch. On the way out of town there was a warning for needing chains from Springfield onwards (Springfield is 3/4 of the way there) so I continued anyway and picked up a set of chains for the subie in Darfield. Sure enough, the closer I got to the ranges, the more snow there was on the ground. By the time I got to the start of Arthur's Pass there was a chain fitting stop in 100m visibility whiteout conditions. I kept going for a bit but eventually turned around; it was hard enough to drive in the snow, let alone tramp!

Geoffrey in his natural habitat

My 'disgruntled' face

So, after having taken that disappointment like a man... *cough* ... I scooted back to work for a week. Last weekend was my friend Jake's 21st party in Queenstown- what a place! A group of ~20 of us took off from Christchurch on Friday morning (we had a beast of a rental car) and got to the backpackers at about 4:00pm.


We partied that night, in typical student fashion. Saturday arvo rolled around and Scott, Tom and I decided it was a good plan to boost up to Cardrona for an afternoon half-day ski/board. We just about got beached a handful of times on the mud track up the hill- ended up getting there fine. Had a sweet day on the mountain despite poor visibility and a bit of rain. That was the inaugural run on my board which I frankensteined together out of a couple of others and it went bloody well! Got up enough speed to make the bails count anyway.

On the way up to Cardrona - this photo doesn't do the landscape justice

After a hard day of disgracing myself on the snow, it was straight into disgracing myself in town. We went for a pub crawl through Queenstown until impractical hours of the morning, which was ridiculous amounts of fun. 

The next morning we checked out and drove home - the windies through the Kawarau Gorge were challenging for many.

And now I'm back at uni... but not all is lost! I've started a group which will hopefully become a part of the UCSA clubs: FishSoc. I aim to start up the uni's first fishing club. I've got a facebook page with just over 30 people interested which is cool! (www.facebook.com/fishsoc) They advise you need at least 20 people to be considered for UCSA partnership, as well as a lot of easy admin stuff, so we're nearly there! Very excited about the opportunities.

Oh, and Scott and I have a trip to Mt Hutt planned for this Sunday, which should be sick! I've been nominated for an 'Ice Challenge' thing by Francis, so I'll be dunking myself in ice-cold water or something while I'm up there. Brrrrrrr.

Okay that's it! Cheers for sticking through this long one :D

Wrapping Up

We're coming to the end of the semester- it ends on Friday- so the deadlines are coming at us thick and fast. The study grind is on in earnest until the end of exams. As such there's not a lot to fill the blog in on.

The temperature has stayed well out of the double digits for a week or so now, hitting -4 overnight on a regular basis. Hopefully we're in for some good snow dumps in time for the holidays! I've found a couple of mates that are keen as for a tramp and snowboard so we'll see how that unfolds in a fortnights time. The tramp I posted the route to earlier is definitely on the to-do list.

On an outdoors-related note, some of you guys might know my flatmate Scott (aka Donald). We went for a fish over the weekend in the Waimak mouth on the Friday before this weekend just been. Didn't catch anything, 'course. During the course of the arvo Donald managed to surrender three of my spinners to the riverbed; bloody unfortunate! Went for a stomp around in the pine forest afterward and found a couple of bivvies, which was pretty cool.

That's about it. Sorry for the mundane read- things are a bit that way at the minute!

- Peace :)

Happenings

Time for a brief update!

Unfortunately the weather and the uni workload haven't been playing the game this weekend, so the tramp didn't go ahead :( We've re-scheduled for a few weeks time- during uni holidays- so that's something to look forward to! Shenanigans still shall ensue.

Friday was the second UC ForSoc bbq which was, by all accounts, an extremely messy event. I arrived at 14:00 and had a few beers. It was a calm scene; venison mutton and tahr on the spit, yarns being spun and beer was flowing. I took a walk back across the road to grab a swannie and returned to find an all-out food fight in action. Spuds, bottles of tomato sauce, miscellaneous meat; all flying through the air, over the flat, into the wary crowd on the other side. At some stage a bloke took offence to getting a spud to the face and a brawl erupted, but was quickly quenched. After all of that silly behaviour had calmed down, it was time for round two.

I had noticed earlier a suspicious looking blow up pool in the far side of the back yard (far too cold in chch to be required), which was about to come into its own. Two girls lost a bet to a couple of guys and jelly wrestling ensued- the pool had a whole lot of KY jelly in the bottom. The girls were shortly joined by a whole lot of randoms getting tackled into it, with well-dressed people being the prime targets. I was safe in my swannie!

Then some bloke climbed to the top of a 15m tall silver birch to chuck a road cone up there. That was pretty cool.

So despite missing out on tramping shenanigans, I feel like I've still filled my quota for the weekend! Time to get back into the grind ^_^

>> Photos! :D https://www.facebook.com/forsoc.canterbury/media_set?set=a.668247949907196.1073741830.100001659902057&type=1 

Shenanigans shall ensue.

Through the last couple of weeks at uni we've been flat out with assignments, which of course means I've been doing A LOT of procrastinating. It's not all bad news though! During one particularly productive procrastination session I planned out an excursion in Arthur's Pass. About an hour west of Christchurch along SH73 there's a sweet little loop heading from the highway side up the Cass River valley. The walk is largely through beech forest following typical South Island freshwater streams. Hopefully we don't have a lot of this rain this week, or the stream crossings will get a bit hairy! (shout out to Heather, Becky, Emily and Scott - RIP dry clothes).

We're planning it to be a good effort, with at least a full car of us heading up. A good stash of bevvies is on the packing list too, so that should keep things interesting. It'll only be a matter of time before someone ventures out for a late night nudie dip in the stream, I reckon. We'll be staying in Hamilton Hut - a 20 bunk mansion of a hut! I've included a link to photos and topo maps of the area, if you're interested.

I'll try and get a few photos of my own to chuck up here when we get back.

That's all for now! :)

Topo map of the loop: http://www.topomap.co.nz/NZTopoMap?v=2&ll=-43.085815,171.680604&z=12

Photos:
http://www.deanmyerson.org/files/photo%20archive/foreign/nz2009/nz09%20061.jpg
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-DfSrfqGA2cWmkKYVwqvgfGIG93rRUSxUguLH4NzziFq6Q_drBuWI4SkilmhmVUnJYUq5_rMcHp6pC3MTLAXXZDw8-BWOBv_12cK6UZVB-1fuJuaRo56I2d0CI3G9WGWfO3ataR5JGZLu/s1600/_MG_8091.jpg
https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5203/5358653052_6c8fa7fed2_z.jpg

In Brief

Why not start a blog with a question? [dry?]

Why start a blog at all? Because I think that my experiences and thoughts will be common with someone elses, and hopefully they will find it entertaining or otherwise interesting! I hope to make this a blog full of photos and updates which reflect what's going on in my life, a highlights reel so to speak. Having said that, I wouldn't promise it to be the most spectacular, most mind-blowing or most influential blog ever. But I digress- it could be cool.

More coming soon!