Living with the Kiwis: Watersport Weekend

On Friday, when I looked on the "GrabOne" deal of the day, a bunch of us girls decided to buy the half price surf lessons at Muriwai beach. The next thing that popped up was 50% off entry to the Harbour Crossing Auckland, the ocean swim here that is part of the NZ series. It starts literally right down the road from the house, so I can walk down on race day, which just so happens to be next Sunday, the 21st of November! I had wanted to do it when I heard about it before, but then thought it was a bit expensive to enter and then wasn't sure about buying a wetsuit or training...well, I'm going to try to swim at least 3 times before the race...just to loosen up the swimming muscles at least! And as for the wetsuit, I purchased one later on Friday (early xmas gift from Mom and Dad). It's not a swimming specific one, because I intended to do more windsurfing, surfing and kite-surfing than ocean swimming in it, but I should be able to swim pretty well in it anyway. It was a lot of work trying them on too!!

Saturday was Nan's birthday, so the family came here to celebrate, and as usual, planned around the high tide so plenty of sailing could be done as well! It was an absolutely beautiful day and I got to go for a little sail, and learn how to use the spinnaker, also test out the new wetsuit and get used to it for a bit! After I went for a little swim in the bay, and Reuben and Libby got excited and came swimming with me. They went for sails as well and even hung onto the foot straps of the windsurfer while their uncle Richard towed them around. Then I had a turn trying to learn to windsurf. Although, it was rigged up with a fairly large sail (not suitable for learning on) so it was very difficult to pull up and then pretty hard to manage once it was up! I managed to go a few meters at least before tipping over. John reckons once I try a smaller sail and get the feel of it, I'll find it really easy! I hope so, because it looks like lots of fun!! After the Birthday celebrations and afternoon of water sports, I took the ferry and met a group of the girls that went wine tasting that afternoon for dinner. After that we decided to try another district in the city, Ponsonby, to see what the night life was like there. There ended up being 12 of us at the start of the night, our gatherings just keep getting bigger and bigger! However, it is quite difficult to keep that many people together for the entire night so slowly it broke down into smaller groups at different places.

Today, I had a nice lazy morning and then went to play tennis at three. Now I need to schedule in times this week where I'm going to fit my training swims in!