April 9 - Brook - This morning was slightly ealriler than yesterday. My home hosts were planning on going fishing at precisely 9:30am to catch the tides just right. The waves on the beach were still too large to launch the boat off the beach using their tractor so we had to launch the boat into the estuary using the regular boat launch. This is not an easy as one might think. The mouth of the estuary is becomming more and more clogged with sand from the beach during the recent storms so the only time a boat can go in our out of the estuary is at a reasonably high tide. We watched where the boats were entering and exiting the estuary last night so Grameme would know where the channel is. The estuary was the easy part.... as far as I was concerned. Once we were out in Mercury Bay the ocean swell began to naw at my stomach. We set out our lines and waited and waited. I had a nibble on my line but no fish. Sitting out in the beautiful sun was amazing, but unfortunately the swell had almost got the better of me. So we tried fishing closer to shore were the swell and motion was less but this still didn't work. So Grameme and Linda dropped me off at the estuary to walk back to the beach house while they continued to fish. It took a walk 1km walk back and a nap to finally feel like I wasn't on the boat anymore. Once the others returned back I was sad to hear that my nibble was the closest any of them came to getting a fish!

Later in the afternoon Brenda, Katie and myself went to Whitianga for a quick look around and a coffee. Unfortunately we couldn't find one coffee shop open on the holiday Monday so we settled for chips and found that the fish & chip store also had a coffee machine, we were in luck! We visited some of the tourist shops, bought some gifts for home and headed back.

Once back we helped Linda make Tuatua fritter's for appitizers! Yummy, I ate so many I didn't really need a dinner meal. Then off to bed for an early morning start as we had to get back to Auckland for an early morning vocational start.