From Fish to Water

All good things come to an end, and all too soon my 5-month contract at the Ministry of Fisheries is over and I'm moving onto new pastures (or more likely waterways - I'll now be a water scientist at SKM). I've had a brilliant time, learnt a lot about fish, and amused a lot of people with my @fish.govt.nz email address (what is so funny about that, anyway?).

Everyone knows the time-old tradition of blaming the person who has left for everything that goes wrong so I thought a little bit of culinary bribery would go a long way to offsetting this. I decided on an Orange Roughy cake:

Everyone was impressed, although there were a few comments that they looked a little undersized, and perhaps we should have established a quota system to determine who got the biggest slice.

Also, I cleverly timed my last day with the infamous MFish quiz. With a brilliant team of spatial and data analysts (and an team name I'm too embarrassed to print) we managed to overcome 15-odd teams to end with a very impressive second place, equal with the previous year's champions, the Silo Busters.

SCUBA Diving

Bridget has got into SCUBA diving in a big way, and invited us along to a pool in Petone one Wednesday night to try it out. It was heaps of fun (anything with so many gadgets has to be) and we both had a great time. Once I got over the initial weirdness of breathing through the regulator I was away...although I never did get the hang of keeping my buoyancy right. If you take in a big breath of air you start floating up, let it all out and you hit the bottom!

We both got a bit nauseous after a while, it may have been due to breathing air out of a can, but probably had more to do with the rollie pollies and handstands we were doing on the bottom of the pool!

People just look odd in SCUBA gear: