Bay of Islands gets the bash!

We're jsut back from a fishing trip up north with our friends from the ITM Fishing Show. We dashed up to the Bay of Islands on friday night and then headed out at 6:30am Saturday for a day on the briney.

First stop was a possie behind the black rocks to get some bait.


What a beautiful spot! Pretty hefty swell though!


After half an hour we had filled the live-bait tank so it was off to Whale Rock for our first attack on the local Snappies.
We were there for about an hour but not much was happening. We decided to move, and because Todd and I hadn't been to Cape Brett before we decided to go to the Hole in the Rock.


And of course you can't go to the Hole in the Rock without going THROUGH the Hole in the Rock.


And because we were all mad fisho's we trawled rapalas THROUGH the Hole in the Rock.


The water out at Cape Brett was even more swelly than in the Bay. Todd's stomach didn't appreciate it.


We then made the call to motor down the coast to the 71m rock (an under water rock that rises to about 50m out of 71m of water). Here Todd hooked up on a hefty Barracouta. I would have photographed it boat-side but I was too busy admiring it's dental work.




After a while Todd was looking decidedly green so we moved back into the Bay and sat on the north side for a while waiting for the Gannets to start feeding. While we were waiting I caught Burnard the Gurnard.


Kerren hooked up on a 4lb Snapper and gave me the honours of winding it in. Not a bad fish!


But not as good as this fish! (Show off!)


After a while we moved back behind the black rocks and fished there for the afternoon. Turned out to be quite a good spot. We hooked up plenty of snapper and even a Jon Dory. The biggie was released, and we took home 6 Snapper, 2 Trevally, 1 Gurnard and 1 Jon Dory.
All in all a fantastic day on the water.
Boris was very impressed!

The next day we drove south to distribute the fish around the family. Guess what's for dinner tonight? :D

Fighting the Machine

I belong to an online DVD rental store. I think they are a great idea if you live way out in the sticks and want to keep semi-in-touch with what the rest of the world is doing. Every week they send me DVDs, I watch them and send them back.

The website for this store has a fuzzy-logic system which looks at the movies you have rented (and the ratings you gave them) and then recommends other titles. This is a good thing because they have over 10,000 titles... and even I don't have enough time to peruse through all of those (you thought choosing a DVD from the local store was hard!).

The strange thing is their system is convinced that I am a geek and should be watching The Lord of the Rings, all of the Star Wars episodes and all movies with 'batman' in the title. We're talking the pastey skinned pizza eating PC using geek here... not your everyday generic geek (who can do useful things like fix washing machines, fill water tanks and change the brake pads on your car).
This is starting to bother me so much now I find myself ordering movies I don't necessarily want to watch just to try and convince the machine that I'm not a geek (if anyone wants to watch 'wicker park' or 'love the hard way' just let me know...)
And yet it still recommends LOTR, StarWars etc...

How does it know? How is this machine clever enough to see past my web of deception? And how many other geeks out there are doing the same thing to try and escape being labeled a geek by a machine?

Somehow I think this is a battle I'm fighting on my own...