Autumn is well and truly here.

 Most of the trees in the garden are actually still green, but this wee corner has turned already. I do love it when things start to look all golden and red, but it also  makes me a little sad as I know summer's definitely over for another year.
However autumn is the time of some good things in the garden, feijoas, figs, olives, tamarillos and my favourite... passion fruit! Last year we hardly had any as I had just planted the vine. This year we have millions! I have the planted vine and also a self seeded one - the self seeded ones always do the besst, but they're also always in the wrong place. This one has grown up our water tank and is now all curled round the gutters. It really can't stay here so it'll have to go - but I gave it one year of fruiting as I know it would be laden, and it is. It'll be so sad to remove it, but I have to.

Anyway, this is the pulp from my first haul, probably got about 10 more hauls like this to go. This may finally be the year that we're passionfruited out! But it freezes really well.

Yesterday Lloyd and I went down to the Poor Knights Islands with some of the people I swim with. This wasn't a dive trip, it was a swim/snorkel trip. And it was completely brilliant! I saw so much more than I did on the last trip when I was actually diving. You can get into much smaller areas so we went snorkelling round all these small caves and little crevices. Lloyd absolutely loved it too. Can't wait for the next trip like this it was rather mind blowing actually!

And finally it would seem that the weather has eased up a bit - well the rain - from today, we're supposed to have almost a week of no rain. Which will be rather a relief.
Have a good weekend!

Diving the Poor Knights

We spent the last couple of days down at Tutakaka with Nick and Sara having booked a dive trip to the Poor knights Islands with PK dive. The Poor Knights Islands are a marine reserve. SO no fishing has been allowed for, I think, the last 10 years, so it is absolutely teeming with life.

We got there early on Sunday morning. It looked a bit choppy from the marina, but Richard, the boat driver said we'd give it a go. So try we did! However it was absolute mayhem. The sea was the biggest, swellyest ( new word!) mess I have ever seen. It was going to take at least 2 hours to get out there and Richard made the decision to turn back. First time in all his years working there that he'd ever done that!

We'd booked to stay in PK dives bach overnight and luckily the trip wasn't fully booked for Monday so we all got back on, with the promise of a third dive too.

The weather was much better, well the skies weren't as blue, but the sea was a lot less scarey.

We got out to the Poor Knights in about an hour, I think and it was all so pretty. Then for the rest of the day we dived, and I reckon these were the best dives I've ever had, pretty much, and I have dived a lot of places in the world.

The visability was 40m+ which even here that's exceptionally good. The life was ace and the dives were some of the prettiest ever.

We're so lucky to live just up the road from them as it makes it something we can do again and again.

The company we were with were amazing, couldn't fault them on anything so we'd definitely use them again.

All in all the best day!!

One of the many, many rays we saw.

me!

Nick and Lloyd