Back in Kiwi Land

After almost 5 months enjoying Ferndale (Bellingham, WA) it was time to head back to New Zealand. Chris is still working in Tanzania on setting up education changes for mid-wives covering preventing maternal to infant HIV transmission. She won’t be down in NZ till Dec. I headed to Vancouver, Canada for the Air New Zealand flight. Since I only had a one-way ticket, Air NZ needed to get confirmation from NZ immigration before they’d let me fly. I had a copy of the boat Kiwi Customs paperwork, but that wasn’t enough. After a pleasant conversation with Kiwi Immigration they decided to let me fly. Four movies latter and a few hours of sleep I arrived at what they told me was 5:30am in Auckland. I made the mistake of checking Yes on the arrival form over hiking gear. That put in onto the W-bench where they took my hiking boots into the back room for a complimentary wash and fumigation. Returning them in a sealed bag.
Fortunately our friends Art and Nancie (Nordic 44 Secondwind) were flying out on the 9am flight back to Vancouver and on to Seattle. We met up for a good coffee (In Kiwi talk I had a Flat White). They gave me their car to use while they are gone, making it pretty easy to do the 2 hour drive up to Whangarei. All I had to do is keep yelling at myself on the drive: Stay left, young man! Stay left! If you are a foreign driver in New Zealand you are allowed to use either your turn signals or your windshield wipers to indicate a lane change or a turn. Turns out you can’t use your turn signals when it starts to rain.
On the upper picture you can see that the earth quake didn’t knock Georgia over. It was actually primarily on the South Island with some damage on the lower North Island in Wellington. I had a local painter (Simon SK Painting) repaint the blue and white boot stripe while I was gone. He did a thorough job, but ended up billing me 40% over his estimate. Oh well.

Now its time to get the bottom paint on. I decided to start with a primer tie-coat (Altex Primashield). This should give a good base to cover the old Petit soft paint with Altex Carboline 3000 (same as Altex #5). The tie-coat went on pretty quickly and dries really fast.

Oh yea, a gratuitous picture of Quinn hanging with gramps.
Time to go paint a coat of bottom paint.
Paul