Brief Interlude....

 Thanks to long delayed, major renovation works in our head office, I have been working from home for the last couple of weeks (much to my wife's distress...goodness knows how she is going to stand me being around all the time when I retire in a few years!). Anyway, around 4pm on Weds, one of my colleagues called and asked "Is Ruth still keen to get you out of the house" - when I answered in the affirmative, he then asked if I wanted to go on a work fishing trip the following day, which he had arranged but from which a couple of invitees had dropped out - well. what could I say - except yes! 

The charter boat "Seasprite" (I think) which took us out for the day - around 16 fishers plus a crew of two

Exiting Westhaven marina in the CBD - if you look by the blue crane, or whatever it is, you can see what appears to be a WWII vintage landing craft

Devonport Naval Base on the Northshore of Auckland, home to the Royal New Zealand Navy

Not the traditional sunny days fishing in the Hauraki Gulf, in fact there was a reasonable swell and one of our customers got very seasick and spent the whole trip asleep in the inside cabin!

View into Auckland CBD on the way back in. Not shown in my images are the large number of container ships "parked" on our route to the fishing ground - we must have seen at least ten, waiting their tujrn to dock and be unloaded - I have never seen them stacked up like this before and was a very obvious sign of the continuing issues with worldwide supply chains!

Red snapper - the fish we were catching. Each person is allowed 7 per day, and its ok to combine, so if you have 15 people on a boat, you can bring back 105 snapper - it doesn't matter if one person catches 30 of them! In the end, we had enough for five fish each - even though I only actually caught two, and I am pretty sure a couple of the guys got none. my female boss Jo put us all to shame, catching 4 of the first 5 fish landed! As I remarked to my colleague, this is socialism in action - some caught none, some caught ten - but we ended up with five each (even the guy who was sick in bed all day! 

And here are the last of the Perry plastic Sudanese warriors

I did one unit of four bases of Nile Arabs - based purely on the clothing of the base figure (if they had too much, I deemed them Arabs rather than Fuzzies!)

Basically, armed the same as the Dervishes, but with different heads added

And the last few Dervishes have been completed too

Not much to say about these that hasn't been said in the previous posts

Next up will be a return to the Austrian Army parade!