Orchid farmer

This Taiwanese gave my wife some orchids from his farm near the zoo. I invited him to go sailing with me. He brought along a friend.

Golfers

I tried to convert golfers into sailors. The first one was David Jin.

Orrin was the golfer who helped me stop going to the driving range. He invited me to play a round with him and his coach David Jin, at the Narrows golf course.

Kenny was another golfer that I met at the Narrows golf course. His handicap was 14 and he could draw his tee shot with the driver.

Charlie played golf with me at the Narrows. He has two children. He is now training his daughter to play golf at St. Andrews.

Horace Ng was a golfer and an ex-colleague from Sarawak Shell. We went sailing at Paihia, Bay of Islands.

I invited John Huang to come sailing with me one day. He brought his whole family! Luckily it was a calm day and there was plenty of room in the large cockpit of the Nanook.

Crew

This Brazilian man stepped off the plane at Auckland at 9 a.m. and he was crewing for me at 2 p.m. the same day, at a regatta on Lake Ngaroto!

Father and son crew

Alex was my crew during a Sunday regatta. He kept on asking me why I was going so [slow]. A displacement mono hull yacht cannot overtake its own bow wave; it cannot plane the same way as a Laser dinghy or fly one hull like a catamaran.

Alex normally sails a catamaran, a Paper Tiger. He enjoys running circles around us as we raced on Sundays in our mono-hulls.

Kestrel, a 19-footer

My first launch at Lake Ngaroto to check for leaks and integrity of the hull.

In 1997 we were staying at our first house at Hamilton East. We moved after my son, Kevin finished his studies at the Waikato U.

 I was using a Mercedes to tow my first boat in NZ. It had lots of power; better than the Honda Accord!

Then I was using a Volvo to tow the Kestrel.

Then I bought a new house, new boat and a 4x4 to tow the 22-footer! I decided to go overboard and spent all my money because Eugene, my youngest son completed his studies at Canterbury U. I am on super and it is time to relax and smell the flowers.

There were quite a few flowers in my own garden in NZ because Christine's hobby is gardening. :) (Please click on this link to go to another blog to see all our flowers.). My hobby is not photography; but I needed plenty of photos for illustrations on my 58 blogs! To date I have taken some 60,000 digital photos. They are so easy to add to blogs. The Kodak prints have to be scanned, saved to computer HD and then uploaded to the blogs. One hobby leading to another; all required photos to make my blogs more interesting for my followers.

Digital cameras are great for taking photos for my blogs. However they do not last very long. These are my cameras. I bought 2 Nikon's when they were on sale at Harvey Norman last Christmas ($60 each). Yes, there is a third camera which I used for taking this photo of the Nikon's.

Sony

Sony Cybershot

This Cybershot worked hard for me for 3 years and has been a very easy camera to use. I reluctantly changed to Nikon. There were rumours that the new iphone would be able to take better photos than [point and shoot] cameras. Harvey Norman got rid of all their cheap cameras by holding a sale.









I received the first Sony Cyber Shot as a Christmas gift from my 3 children. It stopped working suddenly one day. Then I bought another one similar at $200 less and better than the first one! When it conked, I bought the bottom one, my 3rd digital camera. It has a [macro] button which became very useful when taking close-ups of flowers:

Macro for a close-up