October 26th 2021: Below

As I'm writing this my hands smell like paua and my hair has a salty grime that's actually quite comforting. It links me back to a long weekend that feels like a blur now – filled with good times and goodness with some really good people. Three families and eight kids.

We needed to escape from the world, to disconnect. We needed to put a campfire at the centre of our lives and revolve around that. That's what makes the Catlins such an incredible part of New Zealand and especially our lives here in the south.

The waves I had promised, on the whim of my own optimism and recklessness, never arrived. But it didn't matter. Instead my kids turned to diving and we spent three days underwater learning about weight belts, paua, kelp forests and the Catlins coastline. When we did have an opportunity to surf again they chose another dive instead.

There's something special about watching your kids learn about a whole new way to interact with the ocean. Diving and learning to collect just the right amount of paua for a feed and no more. Learning to take note of the cracks and quirks in the reef and bays that hold a bounty for a later day. The epiphany that these cracks and hollows are not too disimilar to the way we depend on our local Four Square when we need it.

It adds another dimension to our coastal obsession and it opens us up to a whole new world.

See you at the beach ... Derek

PS I actually took this weekend off from the camera ... mostly. I wanted to immerse myself into the moments and to be on hand to prevent any of the kids drowning, or just having a bad experience. We managed that easily, but no photos from our dives sorry. I'll bring you a better glimpse in a future edition.