We came out of the Rumatakas and pulled into the beach next to the Bach that we had rented last year with my parents. Like many kiwi spots the "no camping" sign is often not strictly enforced. Better yet i had remembered that site having a public toilet so we pulled in in the dark, did a drive round and no loo. We drove up to another public toilet, used it and came back and set up the bed. Did we mention how much gear we had? we ended up chucking a lot of it into the front seat.
After a somewhat sleepless night (we were both jumpy from every sound) we awoke to a beautiful sunny day in Napier. we found the loo a few feet from the truck. ah night time. We were here so i could dive in the Napier Aquarium. Last year we had seen that you could go in during feed time but sickness and a lack of a log book/NAUI card had kayboshed it that time. This time i was ready, all my gear, my NAUI card and my logbook.
We showed up at the Aquarium waaaaay to early but i was told 12:30 on the phone. I was told we would suit up and enter the pool at 1:50 to check for buoyancy and then go in and feed at 2pm. Matt, the staff person, was a nice fellow. So nice that he lent me a weight belt and weights when i realized i had left my integrated weight system at home. I paced around the back in the staff only area. Backs of aquarium smell like zoos if they smelled of fish and seaweed.
Finally the time arrived, i had had my briefing earlier.
1)what to do if the manta ray gets a hold of your glove while eating from you (you let him pull it off, hide your naked hand and swim over and get it when he spits it out).
2)how to feed the shark (take the whole fish tail first and stab it into his mouth, you may have to do this a couple of times)
3)stay off the tunnel!!!! (it scratches easily from anything)
I popped in and followed Matt and the bucket across to the feeding area. There was quite a crowd including my favourite camera man.
We fed those fish. I was not keen to try feeding the 'pet ray' though it was impressive, take a deep breath, remove regulator, put a chunk of raw fish in your mouth, give the "up" signal and stay still while he swims in your face and takes it out of your mouth. The sharks also were full and wouldn't come over to me for the 'stab fish in your mouth'. I was undeterred, i threw chunks of fish everywhere and the bigger fish came and put on a show.
i'm the one with the red stripe.
please note the fish in Matt's mouth (he's the one on the right) and thats the pet ray about to come up and grab it.
Finally when the food was gone i headed around for a bit of a swim. Had to show off a little bit, the kids were fascinated by a diver in there so i proved how strong i was with a one-finger handstand.
i continued my swim about stopping to give a fan a treat.
the only downside to the swim was that at one point i had issues with bobbing up and down, the weight belt had shimmied around to the front, when i finally got it back on right i figured out why it had slipped. remember that handstand...not my weightbelt...one weight had slipped out. on the plus side it hit the floor not the expensive tunnel.
we ended the day by driving back down the road to find the girls who sold cherries last year. they were cheap and delicous and much to our delight they were there still so we bought another kilo and headed out to Tauranga where we had a date with a man and a boat...
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