Grandad's photos

We stayed Friday night in Tairua, and went for a walk at Pauanui this morning, where we could see Slipper Island (where David and I spent a couple of uncomfortable nights in 1988 on 'Juliet' sheltering from 50-60 knots).

Tairua has a boatyard, and various moorings, this dinghy obviously left by a landlubber who didn't know about 'shipshape' and 'stow the oars'. Maybe he likes rowing with one oar. The ferry 'Ngoiro' now surfs the sand as a restaurant.

Birdwise, we found a nice duck, and some godwits, fresh in from Siberia via Japan with birdflu.

The sunset view east from our motel showed up earth's shadow climbing in the sky.

We bought some 7 X 50 binoculars recently from Mitre 10 Mega 'you pay more, we pay less', for $20. They have this yellow coating that makes distant clouds invisible, and no doubt, also the comet's tails and faint nebulae that I bought them for. But if you were a Russian tank commander like Julie here, you would be just so impressed with the hammer & sickle, bullets and map of the world with Russian satellites. The right eyepiece has a non-illuminated graticule scaled 1 to 4 that allows you to see if one ship is taller than another, but the graticule rotates when you adjust for vision correction, so for me, only works on masts at 45 degrees. Julie has trouble using these binoculars because her face hurts with laughing. Especially at what David would think of them. They came with a camouflaged carry bag.