Ok Dudes

Since you last heard from me I've learned a lot of new things. Good news isn't it? This past weekend was nuts! I was constantly bust from Thursday morning until Sunday night. Thursday morning I finally went spearfishing, it's too bad there wasn't any fish to shoot. NZ's fish population is lame, so far... I've been offered to go on a blue water trip to shot marlin sometime in the next month or so. I think I might go for it. I went diving with this kid Adam, I met him at the Bluefins meeting. He's a really cool dude who studies aquaculture at AUT, which means he's a fish specialist. I'll be diving with him more during the next few weeks.

Thursday night was a party and a half! New Zealand had it's Air Guitar Championships at the AUT campus bar. I joined the shredding of air and with 5 other Americans and 4 Kiwis. Garrett, a friend of mine, got 3rd place and is moving onto the finals! He might even have the chance to head over to AUS for another competition! I chose to shred to 3 Inches of Blood- The Goatriders Hoard. Pat, you'd be proud. That will be up on the tube eventually... I didn't win but I got a sweet hat!

After the competition ended, around 11pm, I began to drive on a 3 hour journey to a town for diving the next morning. I met at a hostel around 2am, got 4-5 hours of sleep and went diving Poor Knights Islands. I brought my underwater housing and took a bunch of video. I also learned how to use it more efficiently. Instead of swimming down with the housing, I drop it down on the float line and swim down to it. There I do the filming and can have more time under the water. It's hard work moving that around. I reached a personal best on Friday too! I hit about 1:45 minutes and reached around 60 feet, according to the SCUBA dudes I dove with. I also dove through a little cave. This I went on two dives that day. I'll give more details in the next post and include some pictures.

We (me and two other friends who dived on SCUBA) got back around 7pm. At 8pm I left for LOUD retreat. The retreat was for young adults 18-35 and everyone was from Life Church in Auckland, I'm sure you can google it. They have their young adult service on Wednesday nights. There's about 300-400 people who attend. 300-400 people my age!!!!!! It's fantastic. I'm meeting a lot of cool people, divers and longboarders and I'll also be joining the film team and editing some of there promo videos! Since it's a "mega church" there is 3-4 cameras. The video on Wednesday nights is run like a concert, lots of lights, smoke, cranked guitars, bass, and drums and a small push/mosh pit in front where people dance for Jesus! The atmosphere is really passionate and it's definitely a change from CBC. The retreat went really well. There was singing, 5 sermons, games, and food, like most retreats have. I met a lot of interesting people and made some good friendships. Around 20 people got saved. Boomshaka! I'll write more on it in the next post, but here are some pictures to keep you satisfied for now.