Warn The Town, The Beast Is Loose

Back in April my lovely friend Luise won a voucher for the PADI Open Water elearning in a raffle.   She happens to be a super duper pro diver already, so being the lovely soul she is, gifted me the voucher as she knew Aric was keen on me learning to Scuba. (I guess I was semi-keen too – I just don’t like expensive hobbies as I am a cheap skate – so never even considered learning before.   Plus, it scares me, and I am a baby, and I am really stupid when it comes to knowing how to control my body in situations, so I was worried about pressing wrong buttons and dying of exploding lungs). Anyways after months of putting it off, I booked it and suddenly the course came round and it was time to learn. I turned up at the Dive Centre a bag of nerves and slightly disappointed at the size of our group – I was expecting maybe 4 people per dive instructor, instead we were a group of 6 per instructor, 12 in total. They had also messed up the pool booking and hadn’t told us, so we were exp

A few weekends ago we had a long weekend, so Aric, Tom, Natalie and I took a tiny plane to a far, far away tropical island known as Great Barrier Island.  When I say far, far away, it's just to make it sound all romantic - it's actually only a 30 min flight on an tiny little plane - though a bit further if you decide to take the ferry - about 4-5 hours depending on sea conditions.  The plane journey over is delightful - it takes off from Auckland airport, but it's all very relaxed with no baggage or security screenings and you get on a golf cart to be take all of 20 metres to the plane.  Flying over Auckland is really cool - I know it's a watery city, but seeing it from the air makes you appreciate the vastness of it all - there's water in all directions!!  We flew over lots of little islands before making our descent over beautiful beaches and landing next to the runway at Claris airport - I am assuming the landing on the grass was intentional and no