Fishing

So we went out on Thursday to check out "Borland Lodge", to see if it is an ideal setting to put on our own Youth Conference in September/October. They've got room for about 100 people to sleep, a brand new kitchen/shower/laundry building being put up, AND a brand new hall being built as well. It's amazing. The only setback is that it IS fairly remote - but I guess anywhere apart from Invercargill, Queenstown and Dunedin in this part of the country is fairly remote. Even Queenstown is already.

Anyway, my hope is to put together a smaller scale Youth Conference than what I'm used to. We surely wouldn't get anywhere in the 700's coming, so Borland Lodge seems wonderful. Lots of things for the kids to do in between rallies and whatnot. It's an exciting prospect.

Then we went to try to fish in the Monowai River (I love the names of these places. I'm thinking of naming my kids after some of the towns or lakes. ha) but it was a controlled area, and we were not allowed to fish in it. There is some heavy research going on in the Monowai River and Lake for Didymo - an introduced weed of sorts that looks REALLY slimy but is actually quite wooly to the touch. Anyways, it's a big problem in a lot of the waterways here and apparently it will kill off the fish and waterlife. So that particular body of water (The Monowai) doesn't have didymo in it, so they are doing a controlled study in it on how to destroy it, I think...

So really, we had to go back to the Waiau, I believe, to fish for a bit in the afternoon. It was way different than what I'm used to. No worms. No boat. Shallow, clear, rocky bottom, moving water...certainly not the conditions I've fished in my whole life. We've always gone for the deeper water or the shallow weedy waters for our fish - and never in a highly moving area. So this was odd. A rocky river where you could see or not see the fish if the glare wasn't on the water.

Anyways, I didn't catch anything. I casted a bit, but I'm certainly not as patient as my uncles for that kind of fishing...my arm was tired after only about 15 minutes or so...

Plus we couldn't stay very long because a lot of our day had been taken up by travelling out to Borland and then trying to fish right nearby there (the Monowai is close by)...but since it was closed we had to drive quite a bit back towards Te Anau to find a place where we WERE allowed to fish.

It was a good day, but I was completely stuffed by the end of it. Okay so not stuffed but...tired. Which is stuffed. Which is...worn out. Get it?

I had a dream last night that I came home for a visit and I brought only 4 packages of Tim Tams. How sad. Haha.

Ok I've got a meeting with Karl in 15 so I should go get ready for that. See ya.