hi have been bad but here are some photos of my latest stuff:-)

hi everyone

Life has been cruising by over here on the West Coast. We were having a bit of a dry spell. There was only about one day of rain since the start of Feb. Now it looks like summer is well and truly gone. The forcast for the next week is rain, rain and more rain broken by periods of heavy rain. Lucky for me all this started on my days off so i am sitting inside thinking of lighting the fire and spending the day watching TV. I did manage to get out on Sunday afternoon. I decided to leave work early and go fishing with Jeff. As you can see we did ok and i have spent the last few days eating nothing but salmon. Raw, cooked smoked it was all good.

I had planned to go hunting today cos the roar is only a few weeks away and i want to check out my usual hunting spots to see where the stags are hanging out but cos of the rain i won't.

lots of love and hugs to all.

Malc

The coolest thing down under in the last few weeks has been this comet. It was first seen by an Aussie guy called McNaught.
I had been trying to spot it for a few days. It pretty much has been following the path of the sun so i had been heading out to the beach to see where the sun was going down on the horizion so i would know where to look for the comet once it was dark. I went out to the beach on two different nights but each time the clouds came in and blocked out the part of the sky i wanted to look at. The drive to the beach is a 40km round trip so i was a little pissed off. Then last night i was over at some friends house watching a movie. As i walked home i saw that there was a clear sky and i thought that i should have gone out to the beach to see the comet. Just as i was thinking that i saw the comet. It might be hard to find in the photo but it is just about the flat spot on the ridge over the shed.



Cool sunset waiting for the comet. Just after I took this photo the clouds dropped in.


















A few weeks ago the flax bushes outside my window were flowering. I had Tuis and Bellbirds feeding on the flower stems. This is a shot of a Tui. The Tui's call is one of the iconic NZ bird songs. They look very cool, kinda blue black, with a white tuft of feathers at the throat.

HI everyone.

It again has been some time since i was a good boy and posted. I have been looking at Arthurs blog and he is making me feel a bit slack.

I have had a quiet enough time since my last blog. Most of my free time has been spent in the bush with a bit of nature watching and hunting. This morning i actually got out for the first decent mtb ride in about 6 mths. i just did a normal enough christchurch ride going up the hill on Rapaki and heading down through Vic park. The tarck that Andrew took me down today was called Cool Runnings and it was a nice piece of track. There were one or two build ups and doubles (all of which had chicken routes) and lots of tight fast courners with big berms. Andrew said that the track was quite cut up compared to a month or so ago but i thought it was a blast.

I had a funny meeting at work last week. A korean guy who was my 2a student in 2003 was on my walk so we sat down and had a chat afterwards.

Happy new year all

Hugs
Malc

These are two French people who i took climbing Tom and Sohpie.


















I am not sure who this good looking guy is????

I have just got back from an over night work training trip into the mountains. This is a pic of me scaling the almost vertical slope of a scary mountain. (Or it could be me falling over on a flat snowy slope, you decide) We landed at a hut halfway up the mountain. Then we walked up to the top. There was alot of snow around and it would heve been great to be able to snowboard down the mountain. Some of the slopes we were climbing up were damn steep with a nasty runout at the bottom. A few places would have killed you if you slipped and slid on the ice or snow.









This is the crew













This is a look at about the only blue sky we saw on the whole trip. Check out my nasty beard. I am thinking of keeping it until Christmas so i can go to the work Xmas party as Santa Claus (or ZZ Top)



































This is a look at the hut we stayed in. I am standing on the heli-pad that we landed on. The pad is perched right on the edge of the cliffs that fall off into the Upper Icefall of the glacier. Check out the toilet. We landed here and then walked back down after our first days climbing.









This is the view from the toilet. I took this as I was "relaxing" early on the second morning. The view is so good that it is a shame to close the door, but you had to be on your toes as there are quite a few helicopters flying by. If they catch you with your pants down, you could end up in some poor tourist's photos. The second day was mostly walking out to a heli-pad on the glacier. We had to grovel down steep slippery rocks and waterfalls to get to the glacier far below the hut.

Hi Everyone

It has been a funny old month. I have been out fishing, hunting, hiking and stuff and have seen some really great things.

We had a very cool full moon last week. This is a shot just on sunset as i was driving over the hills to the East Coast.















This was the moon taken when i was out fishing one night after work. It was a sweet night. One of the guys from work and I went about 35 km nth one night to try drag netting in a big coastal lagoon. We were using a double Kayak to set the net. At one stage i was on this really still still water looking at a large White Heron feeding, with the mountains and full moon in the back ground.










We had a week with piles of rainbows. This one was outside my kitchen window
























We also get some great sunsets over here these to are from two different beaches on two different nights




















Another rainbow i saw coming home from hunting one day.