Modern Journalism

Absolutely my favourite place to hang out on line is the ADVrider website.  While it is ostensibly about motorcycle adventure riding, the inmates are some of the most intelligent, funniest, cynical and downright my kind of person people I could ever imagine.

One of the best is about the guy who piloted an XR71 Blackbird spy plane over Libya at 3500mph, photographing missile installations while the Libyans tried to  shoot him down with SAMs. There are not many websites where you get the kind of seat of the pants experiences. Some of the adventure experiences people have in out of the way places are just astonishing.

XR 71 -  http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=332399

Try this for example, if you want to see the calibre of the reports (I warn you, most people find this website astonishingly addictive.) Have a look half way through the thread when he’s in Africa – I love the genuine person-to-person interaction with the various peoples and cultures and what they learn about the people.

Riding through Africa – this guy and his wife are amazing photographers -  http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=710660http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=710660

The following is a thread from one of the inmates "snoid". I sat there nodding my head and sighing in total agreement.

It’s official: I am old and I am a curmudgeon. The modern generation is no good (actually I don’t believe that, I believe they are a product of the environment and will do well. The days of smoking,’ cussin,’ drinkin,’ and other such dodgy newsroom behaviour was for our time alone, when it was almost compulsory to behave that way.)

But I’m sure you will appreciate the sentiments of the following words, shamelessly “dot-commed” from the thead. 

Here it is under the heading of “Interns” 

well, the summer interns are here and it's a good crop.

most of the girls are pretty, one could be a model (tall, blonde, germanic), and they're all from really good schools. the 3 or 4 that sit next to me are seemingly bright and charming and well on their way to good careers in journalism from what i can overhear. one's going to miami, another off to new york, so on... there's just one problem. they're the landed gentry, the whitebread elite... there's no fire in their belly, no spark in their eyes. they're all little iphone-toting, stepford kids.

AND THEY LISTEN TO DAVE MATTHEWS.

shoot me now. i'm gonna point the sidecar south and become a druglord and poison this homogenized country from the outside with meth and cocaine and weed so strong it makes ya blind.

from the newsroom,

snoid

the newsroom used to be a debauched and smoky place, full of flying cuss words and rushing from deadline to last call at the local dive bar.

now it's tampon city. blow it up. change is not good. blow it the fuck up.

it's about being free, making real bad decisions and drinking so much rum you piss yourself. when i was their age, i was fighting, fucking and dropping acid.

i'm not quite ready for the end of the corner diner, the neighborhood pub, the drive-in movie... i want to see weirdness from just one of them. i need some kind of sign that one of these lifeless fucks has a soul. the place is already lousy with 'normal' folks. please interns, just a loud cuss word, a pleurisied cough, a petechial eye. tell me about last night and how close you came to going to jail for a decade. please

Running Aground on Reader Opinion

As boaties, much of our activity is ruled by the tides. The ins, the outs, the ups the downs – how much water over the bar at the end of the estuary –  the bite times for fishing, how much anchor warp do we need to put down and all that.

We all scour the tidal charts don’t we? It’s the same with the weather. Tides and weather, the predictions by which we gauge potential boating opportunities.

So you can understand that having a page of tidal information in a magazine is a drawcard for readers, a sure thing for selling the mag. At the very least it’s a service for readers. And you wouldn’t want cut out your tidal pages without putting up some sort of fight - and that’s precisely the situation that led me to an ugly encounter with an angry reader while tucked up in Smokehouse Bay, with a rum in my hand, aboard the Young 11, Diamond Knife.

The boatbuilders wanted me to trial the boat, which had a highly innovative and stylized interior courtesy of Craig Loomes. Craig has since gone on to create some truly amazing boats – including the big game fishing machine “Ultimate Lady” and Peter Bethune’s “Earthrace,” current holder of the around the world record for a powerboat. But back then he was a boatbuilder and he’d created something special with this yacht.

But I digress. The tidal “situation” started way back when the Ministry of Tides, or whatever the quaint Government department was called when it employed 19,000 people whose job was to make the tides go in and out. Governments did everything in those days and taxpayers didn’t seem to mind being fleeced by them to employ thousands more people than they needed to get everything done.

Sea Spray magazine got permission to publish the tidal information in about 1950, and did so every month as a service. The Ministry of Tides employees were happy to have something to show for their weekly labours.  In the 1980s the new Government focus on charging taxpayers a second time to use the services they had already funded – the so-called ‘user-pays’ – was applied to tidal information.

They were the original Somalian pirates these buggers, and wanted a massive ransom for the magazine to publish the tidal charts. They had no other way of spreading the tidal word, apart from some dinky little books and a pull-out page of tides published in the NZ Herald every year just before summer. The Herald supplement was our bible and was duly fixed by sellotape to the back of a kitchen cupboard, pored over and consulted over the next 12 months for the best tides. Other people used the Sea Spray tide charts every month.

But back to the Pirates. I don’t recall the exact figure they demanded for their information but it was outrageous and certainly more than the magazine could afford.

Faced with this pirate-sized demand to publish the information we decided to keep quiet and keep doing what we’d always done. The demand for money had been delivered to another marine magazine when they asked if they could publish the tides – so we knew about it but because we had not been officially and formally told to pay, we figured we’d keep on publishing the tides until the pirates hove into view across the horizon with their AK47s, at which time we’d drop the whole idea.

 It was about then I hit a proverbial customer relations sandbank at low tide. It came during a call from a loyal reader who asked why we couldn’t increase the typeface and also include more ports in the info. He was quite right, because we published in about six point type to fit it all in - meaning the type  was about the size of the head on a small pin. You needed a magnifying glass to read it, but that’s the way it had always been done.  I’m ashamed to say the reader and I ended up in a bit of a stoush about it, with me making some excuse that was barely believable. The truth was, I was concerned that any change to the way Sea Spray presented the tides might be seen by Treasury as a way of wiping out the national debt.

Fast forward a few weeks. We are sitting on “Diamond Knife” on a balmy evening enjoying fresh crays, scallops and rum when a couple of old blokes from the next boat row over for a bit of socialising.

It didn’t take long before one of them was telling us what a bastard the editor of Sea Spray was. I motioned “silence” to the rest of the crew by dragging an imaginary knife across my throat, as we listened with great interest.

Seems he’d phoned this asshole of an editor with a perfectly good suggestion about the tidal pages and had received a totally uncalled for broadside over the phone.

It went on for some time, me resembling a beetroot with embarrassment and nervously hoping he wouldn’t cotton on. Never was good in a fight, me. Craig and Nigel suppressed great mirth, spluttering and sniggering, until eventually the old bugger rowed back to his boat, no doubt to tell lots of other people about the complete asshole at Sea Spray.

He’d already told three people on our boat and it made me wonder how many others he had told – when a magazine’s image is its credibility and the readers’ opinions of its editor are bloody important.

I never gave anyone an earful on the phone again, except Ken Lusty. The “discussions” I had with Ken were monumental, but never became personal and were always entertaining.

Karmic Happenings at the Beachfront

I’m appealing for help from the interweb community and particularly those who specialise in ancient rituals or kharma. I need to know whether there is any great significance in being covered in dog slobber. In a restaurant. Where there shouldn't, by rights, be any dogs - especially huge ones.

I’m being serious here because yesterday I was singled out for a karmic happening. Yeah man, Kozmik. Or it might be bloody scary, depending on what sort ancient proverbs are covered by the scene I am about to describe.

Let me set the scene. I am in the Takapuna Beach Cafe to have lunch with a friend of a friend who is a publisher. His name is Josh and he is going to very generously allow me to pick his brains about publishing in the hope that it might be useful.

The cafe is very busy with the inside tables and those out on the expansive deck full of people. A happy buzz is in the air and it is a stunning, sunny afternoon on the beachfront.

Suddenly I see it. A horse-sized dog, sort of like a St Bernard with coat like a lion. It races along the deck and in through the doors that are opened onto the deck. This monstrous animal has been racing around on the beach and his mouth is foaming – the muzzle thick with slobber that hangs down in huge, glistening stalactites.

Out of all the people in that packed cafe, who do you think the dog chooses to set his radar lock onto. Who do you think he lopes straight up to and into whose lap does he stuff his face?

That’s right, me.

HE BLOODY CHOOSES ME

By the time I’ve shoved this abomination of an animal away my hands are also covered in thick drool, spittle and slobber. 

The owner of this animal is particularly lucky that I was expecting company at any minute because I would have tracked them down and had a not-so-quiet word.

Is this karma? Does this event have a greater significance in the grand scheme of the universe and all that?

I need to know whether there is an ancient Chinese proverb that covers this situation.

Something like “man in restaurant chosen by dog to slobber on will receive many riches and be very wise with untold beauteous virgins at his service.”

But knowing my luck it’s more likely to involve the shrinking of genital organs and enlargement of the arse.

Conceding Defeat

I went to fix a problem with my TDM motorbike last weekend. On a previous ride weekend it seemed to be running very rich and at one stage, after an extended run at 30mph, it was coughing like a 50-a-day smoker. 
 

According to the website Carpe TDM, these things suffer from wear in the carbs that causes the richness problem. I had been wary that mine might have it, so I had my suspicions. I got some parts and last Saturday morning, donned my neatly washed and ironed with sharp creases overalls. Striding purposefully across the garage, spanner in hand I removed the fairing, tank and seat. There nestled neatly between the frame rails were ..... a birdsnest of tubes. Reminded me of opening a can of spaghetti. OK. Be methodic. Make sure you mark everything so you can stick it all back together again.

Must be time for a coffee. Diversion has always been a character flaw of mine when confronted with anything even a little bit difficult.

This is a "what the hell is that" moment.

Because I had nice clean overalls on, I was allowed in to sit at my computer when normally I have to take it all off. Grease spots on the stairway carpet is a bit of a no-no in our house and guaranteed to cause the onset of Force 9 grumpiness among certain inhabitants.

www.carpetdm.com..... “err, where are the fastenings?” I typed.  “Has anyone actually taken Mk2 carbs off...... how do you do it?”

There is an unnerving silence on carpetdm.com, the exceedingly rare internet equivalent of hearing a pin drop. I am starting to get a feeling about this. A nervous feeling.

The best I can get is from the TDM maestro, “Studley Ramrod” (I kid you not) is “well, the Mk 1 is much easier.”

Geoff Green arrives. We have a cup of tea and we both poke around using screwdrivers, allen keys, and glasses with thick lenses while holding a Maglite torch in our teeth. There is a lot happening between those frame rails.

There is the sound of a penny dropping.

I am a reasonable basic mechanic. But the most important thing among my repertoire of spannering skills is when to drop the screwdriver, put everything back together while you can, and so you can start the machine in order to ride it to the local dealership.

Because there is nothing more soul destroying than turning up with part of a bike on a trailer, the rest of it in the boot of the car, and a plastic ice cream container full of screws, nuts, bolts, hoses and clips. The dealer will for sure have a look on his face that says...  this person is going to make  contribution to my Ferrari F40 savings fund.

I conceded defeat. I buttoned up the TDM and on Thursday I rode it to the dealership. It was a stunning day, and as I waited for Lins to pick me up on her way home from work, I leaned against the bike and basked in the warm late afternoon sun and talked bike talk with the owner and a mechanic and someone who was unloading a dead KTM motocrosser from his flatbed. The sun warmed my outside, and my insides were warmed by the dealer’s “Ferrari Fund” look being directed at the person dropping off an orange European-built race bike.

Hokianga Handline Hell

I must have been in a benign mood. Somehow, Lucy from the Hokianga was sitting on my boat with her fishing kit in hand.

The invitation to join us for a fish was extended to her bloke, but he was on call to assist with the Christchurch earthquake recovery and the Government didn’t think a day’s fishing was sufficient reason to fly him back to Auckland. He passed on the invite to Lucy.

There were two problems with this. The first is that Lucy had the capability to kick our arses, both fishing wise and in pretty much every other way as well. The only way to take out Lucy would be by howitzer at a very long distance.

The second was that Lucy is from The Hokianga. I’m deeply suspicious of the place and everyone from there. I’m sure many of you will have driven over the hill at Opononi and gasped in awe as your senses are captured by the incredible spectacle of the sand dunes of Mitimiti and the roiling power of the Hoke Bar.

But the stunning beauty and warm nature of the people are just to fool you into letting your guard down so the place can get under your skin. I first developed this theory when I towed a small wooden boat there for a summer holiday on a friend’s farm.

There were a few people enjoying a beer in the sun outside the pub at Kohukohu as I drove past and we all waved to each other like good mates. By the time I got the boat over that road to my friends’ place the road had just about pounded it to pieces and forever after it leaked.

Later on we went fishing on the muddy brown waters and as the locals unrolled their kacky old hand lines I decided to show them the real oil with the shiny, well-oiled gear that worked so well in the Gulf.

What I found was my gear was ideal for a good haul of snapper, so long as they weren’t any bigger than four inches. It wasn’t the flash Hauraki Gulf gear, carefully washed and oiled after every use, that contributed a good pile of 10lb snapper to the hangi. Fooled into a false sense of security by the Hoke once again.

I once joined Lucy’s brother in his 12ft tinny fishing inside the harbour, just off Opononi. As the tide began to run, the seas stood up and we began taking green ones over the side.

With no bailer on board, the water was soon around our ankles and I started to recall all the warnings that had been given so forcefully in Coastguard safety class. I’m sure they mentioned a bailer. I could see the Hoke bar with its curling white water from where we were anchored and the tide was screaming out. We’d have been out there in minutes. Radio? Nope. Life jackets? Nope. Flares… well, I think you can guess the answer.

Bruce just chuckled, hauled in the anchor and the ancient Johnson outboard burst into rattling, smoky, life on 12^th pull and we went home. The week before he’d taken a Norwegian tourist to the same spot, caught a live mackerel and sent that down saying to his guest “this should be good” and hauled in a 30lb snapper. He kept the jaw and I could easily fit my closed fist in it. It’s all part of the Hokianga conspiracy to draw you in, then turn you into a gibbering mess.

And now Hokianga born-and-raised Lucy was sitting on my boat, in the gulf, with a handline, three sinkers that could have provided the ballasting arrangements on an America’s Cup yacht, a pile of smelly pilchards and a reputation for kicking arse.

I’d have to show her. This time, she was on my turf.

I carefully inserted my highly specialised Z-man fluoro painted worm hook onto an electric chicken softbait and sent it down. My expensive fishing combo would soon have us knee-deep in twenty pounders. I’d seen it on TV, where that hyper presenter only has to fish with the same gear and within half an hour (minus the ad breaks) it is time to go home for a filleting session. I couldn’t lose.

Lucy’s hand jerked the crusty old hand line and soon a snapper was flapping in the boat. Must be a fluke, I thought as I restrained myself from tipping her over the side as she casually sat on the gunnel. I waited for the line-tearing, reel-searing run of a mighty red as it found my irresistible fake bait offering.

Lucy mashed another smelly pilchard onto the hook and before long her hand was jerking to set it into the boney jaw of another snapper. She would definitely have accidentally gone over the side this time if I hadn’t felt the tentative jerks of what would surely be that mighty fish. A jack mackerel. Well, good bait for when I decide to get my hands smelly.

It was clear I had purchased a faulty upmarket rod and reel combo, or the wrong baits. I frantically tried leadhead sinkers of four different sizes and 12 other colour combos of soft baits - jerk shads, dork fads, curry chicken, vindaloo chicken, beef in black bean sauce -you name it. Perhaps the special knot I used to tie the line to the fluoro painted sinker was wrong? Everyone knows you need the right gear and a full selection of soft baits to catch fish these days. The bloke at the bait shop told me so and why would he put me crook?

The sound of Lucy’s voice became like a chainsaw, the foul smell of pilchard only heightened by the stench of fresh snapper as she twitched the handline, hauled in another fish and slipped it into the bin.

You know how some people can get really annoying in the space of an afternoon? Let’s just say that Lucy won’t be coming back on my boat any time soon. Even if we have to eat sausages.

Sanctioning Madness

About 1000 years ago I worked for a magazine in the UK that would sanction and pay for all sorts of madness if we could persuade the Editor it was a good idea.

One afternoon, when it got dark at about 2.30, and over a few warm, hellish strong pints at the pub nearest work, we decided to tow a boat to Europe. It would be an epic journey with a trailerable boat all the way to the grand Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

Lordy lordy it sounded like a good idea with a few pints of strong Youngs Winterwarmer swishing around inside.

Planning for the Great Event took place, generally over more pints of warm Pommy ale until I began to get quite a liking for the stuff. Once, we even tried to work our way from one end of the bar to the other. The bar having 10 different types of “real ale” on it. We got to number eight once but I don’t remember any constructive planning coming from that meeting and I nearly got run over by the tube train going home so we took it a bit easier after that.

We had a borrowed boat, we had a company car, we had insurance, we had a budget and permission to go from the big boss. We planned to use the boat as a caravan on the trip to Geneva, then cruise around the lake.

Then it all started to fall apart. Someone had the bright idea to look at whether there were any trailer boat ramps on Lake Geneva. That led to looking at whether there were any powered craft on Lake Geneva. We found out that outboards were banned from the Lake. Quietly whistling to ourselves that it was a good thing we found out before we got to Geneva.

So, all fired up with no place to go, we headed in the other direction to Dartmouth in the UK. In NZ terms it’s a bit like deciding to go to on holiday in Fiji, then making a last minute change and heading to Greymouth.

To the River Dart we headed. Dartmouth is a pretty little town and we launched locally for a nice quiet cruise upriver.

The boat was a Shetland 18 and had been designed by a most interesting character called Colin Mudie. He has the most eclectic, some would also say eccentric, collection of marine designs to his name, most of them very successful.

In his youth he was an intrepid adventurer on a grand scale. He sailed a 21foot boat called Sopranino across the Atlantic, then tried to take a hydrogen balloon over the top of the Atlantic. The balloon gondola was designed by Mudie so it could withstand a serious fall into the ocean and be sailed home if necessary. It was. The balloon got caught in a huge storm forcing them to ditch and they completed their journey by sailing to the US coast.

He also designed the outrageous offshore racing powerboat, News of the World, which looked like a massive jandal and was built from cold moulded plywood. Unfortunately the uncooled exhausts and the wood got far too friendly with each other and it burned to the waterline.

The little Shetland showed definite heritage to the NOW with unusual rounded bow sections and concave bottom.

But back to the River Dart. It didn’t take us long to cover the whole of the river so we tied up to a vacant pile mooring and settled in for the night. Miscalculation was again the name of the game and what we thought was going to take several days had taken no more than a few hours. We needed plan B.

Plan B was to put the boat back on the trailer and head further down coast, where we hauled up in one of those quaint coastal villages with narrow stone streets and a small harbour full of brightly coloured fishing boats.

We were about to find out what it is like to go boating when there is a 10 metre rise and fall in the tide. We launched into the harbour in the late afternoon and pottered about up and down the coast.

BY the time we got back there was about a 200 metres of sand where the harbour used to be. We anchored on the edge and I sent Lester (who was official photographer for the journey) into town for some fish and chips, a bottle of rum and some coke. This turned out to be a very bad move.

He returned to the boat, which by then was sitting about half way up a mile-long beach. The water just disappeared, seemingly within minutes. It was equally scary at night, when the water arrived back, the boat was floating in minutes and in three or four metres depth not long after.

We sort of missed that exciting event though, with the bottle of rum having disappeared at an alarming rate while set sorted out the problems of the world. We missed the tidal flow the next morning as well, with Lester emerging from the small cabin having rolled in a vomitous mixture of chips, rum and coke for much of the night.

This called for another plan.

Plan C was, chuck the boat on the trailer, head home and call it a day.

Best plan we’d had all week.

THE 10 WORST THINGS I’VE BOUGHT FOR MY BOAT.

It’s true that a boat is a large hole in the water that we pour money into.

But let’s face it, a lot of the things we get for our boats are fun. We enjoy buying and using them. TAS (or tackle acquisition syndrome) is a recognised psychological condition experienced by fishermen and results in aberrant behaviour whenever the sufferer has been denied chance to buy the latest tackle.

But even the canniest among us make mistakes. In the enthusiasm of the moment and over-excitement purchases are made that turn out to be like that pair of platform clogs in your wife’s closet – great idea at the time but something to make you shudder in the cold, hard, light of day.

My list of greatest cock-up purchases would have to start with buying a 6.2m boat with an unbraked trailer. It was OK to move short distances in the dry, but add water to the roads and this rig became like a hungry dingo and you never knew when it was going to snap your hand off.

The only time I took it on the motorway was marked by idiots deciding that the real estate I carefully left in front of the car was perfect for them to swoop into and hit the brakes. If it was possible to tie a Falcon steering wheel into pretzel-like knots I would have done it as I stood on the brakes so hard my bum lifted off the seat. More than once.

The very first thing I did to that rig was get some over ride brakes for it and that tamed the beast.

Planing board

This little disaster occurred when I wanted a rig that would get fishing lines and lures down deep. It worked pretty well too, except the cheap rod holder I had clamped to the swim platform support tube was not up to it. It only went a few yards before the rod holder snapped with a bang and the entire rig, with brand new reel and rod, ended up on the sea floor. I got that line down deep all right. Dork. I bought a downrigger next.

1kw transducer

This was like buying a really big gun and finding that the barrel is warped. It’s about the size of a house brick and when it’s running sends up a shower of spray that would make an ocean liner proud. But after dozens of adjustments in height and angle, we’ve managed to get it to work at very low speeds, but that’s it. Cruising speed? Forget it. Every software adjustment made to the sounder at the other end of the lead has resulted in fewer functions working in the sounder. I’ve given up with it before it gets any worse.

The Canopy

This one really gets on my wick because it wasn’t cheap. Aux contraire. The side stays that hold it “up” constantly loosen when you’re in heavy weather, fall on your head and the whole thing goes floppy, and loses water tightness. You know how sometimes when you are doing an arse-puckering run downwind in big seas, tip-toeing the boat through it with the throttle – you can’t just stop and sort the canopy out? I know where I’d like to put the thing and that’s very, very close to the person who made it.

Crocs shoes.

These are excellent on the boat. Comfortable, tough enough to withstand fish spines and they dry easily. The only problem is that any time my wife sees me wearing a pair I can guarantee that marital relations will be suspended for several days. Or even a week.

Shimano Calcutta 400 reel

This thing needed a new set of drag washers every time I used it. In 8 months the cost of replacement washers had overtaken what I spent on the reel. When I complained to the tackle store their response was “Why did you buy that thing in the first place?”  “I bought it on your strong recommendation.” Fortunately Shimano tackle has come a long, long, way since then.

Cheap fluorocarbon trace

How many bloody good snapper did I lose with this stuff? My mate Boulder still chuckles about the world championship tanty I threw when I lost a potential 20 pounder off Kawau. I still haven’t admitted to him that I’d saved the thick end of $10 on that spool of trace. Clever eh?

My first outriggers

These were just bent stainless tubes that I put in the rod holders with the rods stuck in the ends. They were wrong in so many ways. First they held the rods so the reels were constantly awash with the bow wave at trolling speed. I had to lean out so far when retrieving the rod that my arse would pucker as I nearly went head first into the drink. We went trolling out off Houhora and kept our fingers crossed all day that we didn’t actually hook anything. It would have been one of those cluster-things you read about. Needn’t have worried because nothing was interested in our pathetic offerings.

Cheap chilly bin.

Another great saving but little did I know that the indentation for the bung was cracked. This allowed a significant quantity of snapper juices to gently seep into the carpet in the car boot after our Sunday fish. Monday afternoon was very hot and as I walked towards the car I thought to myself “bejasis something around here stinks.” I was still a good 20ft away when the awful realisation struck – I knew where the smell was coming from.  The drive home was punctuated by dry retching and gagging and the road back to scented harmony involved much scrubbing.

Can’t beat those savings eh?