Weekend at the bach

I've just got back from a weekend away with Gav, Andy, Nev & Jason. We went up to Waitarere Beach for the weekend and stayed at a friends bach. Such a flash place! We has awesome views onto the back dunes with the sea beyond, and a great fire and lots of movies to watch too :)

Click here for a webcam of the beach!

View from bed, the sound of the sea was so good!

Gav, Andy and me. For those who are wondering, Andy is 'cute and foreign', and is also good at the tank game on Wii!

3 horses but only one hoof on the sand!

This is an old ship called the Hydrabad, it used to look like this:

Now it looks like this! After loosing sails and a hope of escape from the coast, it was foundered on the beach in 1878, no one died in the incident but the ship could never be refloated and has been slowly absorbed by the dunes ever since.
On Sunday I took the opportunity to do some sampling for my thesis. Thanks Andy and Matt for helping out :)

The cow was a bit shocked that we wanted to drive were she was standing!

It was windy but not that cold, and thankfully the waders don't leak!

If you look at the colour of the Raupo (ie it looks a bit dead!) you can see why I got a bit freaked out when I got there - the whole 5km square ish of wetland is covered in dead looking Raupo... I thought that DoC had sprayed the whole lot and killed it or something cause it looked so bad! Thankfully I am only naive, and its actually just winter die-back! (I knew that it did die back, just not that much!) Even so its looking less and less likely that I will do my thesis here now, as DoC seem to add an extra barrier to the project every time we talk to them... We'll see, fingers crossed!

After taking the samples we added ethanol to 'fix' (kill) everything I collected :)