This story is all about the Sanitarium Weetbix TRYathlon I have just done in Nelson. It is something that both of my sisters did when they were my age, and something I have really been looking forward to. I never imagined that I would end up getting interviewed by the local newspaper in the build up to the event, but it was cool to see my story and hear from my old friends that they had seen it to. Read until the end, there is a video about my whole experience. 

If you asked me five years ago, I would have said “never in a million years would I be driving a boat before a car!”.

We’ve come a long way since buying the Oriental Lady in late 2021. I know that all I’ve learnt so far, and all that I want to learn over these next few years will help me in many ways throughout my life.

Having an immediate fear response to a dangerous situation is not only healthy, but a very wise way to act. To not get scared in the face of true and apparent danger is just flat out reckless.
To constantly live in fear however, and be paralysed into inaction as a polar opposite, is also flat out reckless.

This lifestyle of extremes seems to be a real growing trend out in the "real world" with an alarming number of people operating with seemingly no concept of consequence. Similarily the constant state of anxiety that some people are living in is exhausting to watch from the edges, so I can only imagine how exhausting it must be to live it. But what is it like on a boat, constantly surrounded by unfathomable risk?

Today's Salty Thoughts from Capt David revolve around the topic of rubbish, and waste in general, as it seems more and more to be symptomatic of our entire societal interaction with nature. It is an existential crisis for some, and definitely a large component to the footprint of our place in the world, as well as our lasting legacy on the ground upon which we currently tread.

This morning whilst on the dawn dog beach mission, I came across a very old plastic bag of rubbish buried in a deeper layer of the bank just off the normal high tide line. It was not really that visible, except to those paying attention to every little thing around them. The recent years of heavier storm surges, or even the Tonga tsunami of 2022 that rolled through the Kenepuru Sound, may have chipped away at the bank and revealed the short term and lazy thinking of some individual from years gone by.