Auckland, NZ
Having completed our assorted obligations to hearth & home, we returned to a much warmer New Zealand a few months later. As our winter is their summer, that worked out in our favor. Tiffany would like to point out that it was “warmer” vice simply “warm.” She is sensitive to such things.
Since we had a week before Greg’s mom arrived to join us on our adventures in Kiwi-land, we decided to take up some of our new friends on their offer to teach us water skiing. We met Chris & Jo while we were in Tonga, which incidentally would have made a much warmer aquatic instructional environment but see they’re Brits by birth, so we just had to do it the hard way or at least the non-tropical water way…which supposedly helps the stiffness of our upper lips or something…
Chris went first. We can only presume in order to give us some sort of baseline / visual reference of how to do this:
It should be noted before we move forward that Chris had previously mentioned one of his reasons for moving halfway across the world from his home country had to do with New Zealand recruiting him for their national water skiing team. That’s probably useful to keep in mind as we watch Greg attempt to water-ski for the first time in his life, ever. At all. Very new to this:
And of course Tiffany had good run of it as well.
We’re just saying we get Chris on a boat with sails instead of a Porsche engine for propulsion and things would be a lot different. (though not a whole lot, he was in Tonga to work on his kite surfing skills.)
But no matter what, one thing is certain: no matter what sport you use them in, wetsuits make you look about twice as in-shape as you actually are. Which is awesome!
Chris isn’t the first friend we’ve had who’s gone to the South Pacific to indulge their extreme sports addiction. One of our sailor friends sailed from Mexico to the Tuamotu in French Polynesia to basically go windsurfing. Yes. He sailed for six months to get off his sailboat and go sailing on his surfboard. We sailors are an odd bunch.
Greg and Tiffany are traveling around the world on sailing yachts and keep a video blog of their (mis)adventures. If sailing to Tahiti on a 44 ft sailboat, 3-day delays for wine tastings, getting pooped on by seagulls, opening coconuts with dull machetes, sailing past tornadoes and ukulele Christmas carols are for you, then check them out at www.CoastGuardCouple.com!
