Paused pedalling

It has been an extremely wet first half of the year but as we progress through the second half the rain making La Nina weather pattern seems to be losing its grip as dry days now start to outnumber the wet ones, by some margin.

There has been one beneficiary of the last three La Nina impacted years. The native trees planted on our Wairoa Stream project have been going ‘gang busters’. Prior to 2020 we would regularly spend late spring and summer watering the latest plantings just to keep them alive. These last three years we have spent more time digging ditches to try to help drain the excess water away. I happened to notice a picture from August 2020 pop up on a digital diary so today I popped down to the stream to take a comparison. You can see the impressive growth in the pictures below. Who said that old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.

Wellington or gum boots have certainly been the goto footwear for our working bees this year and for the same reason, the usual gravel (mostly mud) routes that I cycle for my regular exercise have been off the cycling menu. I have still managed to get out a couple of times a week but have restricted myself to the tarmac, well at least until the last few weeks. As El Nino gives us a few tasters of drier and windier weather, it is more a case of planning the rides around the wind rather than the rain. Not to worry, I have no big rides planned for this year.

I am dragging Ruth around the Banks Track later in the year and I will follow that up with 2-300km of cycling while she does some touristy things with daughter Anna. I am going to ride a couple of sections of trails that I particularly enjoyed during my rides in the South Island over the last two years.

The Banks Track does involve three days and some pretty serious climbing over parts of the Banks Peninsula so we have been more focussed on getting our walking legs (rather than cycling) better tuned. This has meant a little more hiking than biking. One observation during our many damp walks has been the amazing array of fungus that obviously loves the wet, humid conditions we have been suffering through. A few examples are in the pictures below.

No updates on the Tandem bicycle. It is hopefully being built in France with great craftsmanship, although probably not during August given that everyone in that country seems to take August off for their annual holiday. We are working up some plans for the bike when it finally arrives and it is starting to look as though 2024/25 may be ‘abandoned to the tandem’. We won’t get too excited until we actually have our feet of the pedals.

Well all we have to do for the next few months is endure the political bullshit that an election year brings with it. The media are getting worked up into their usual election year frenzy but it is the same old same old bollocks that is being pedalled by the politicians with the real issues (in the too hard basket) being conveniently ignored. The problem with being a ‘little older in the tooth’ is that you have been through it too many times before. Apart from that, we are really looking forward to spring and the promise that El Nino will bring sunnier fortunes to us. We reserve the right to change our minds on the latter as that weather pattern usually takes us from a surplus of H²0 to a deficit up here in the Far North. With La Nina, we are in the front line as the wet weather rolls in from the North East. During El Nino, the rain is dumped at the other end of the country and we get the scraps up here. In 2015, an El Nino year, our annual rainfall was 922mm. In the first seven months of this year we have had 1,341mm and last year we had 2,494mm.