When I say Stupid Day, I mean Stupid Day as it was celebrated in the RinkWorks time zone. I wasn't here, but this is what I was doing while Stupid Day was happening. I don't think I was more stupid than usual, but I met an awful lot of people who were. :-)
I was on duty with Coastguard from 9am to 9pm and it was an awesome summer's day. (I stupidly didn't have enough sunblock on again, and got sunburned again, so today I look all bright red and stupid.) When I got there I found we were doing a firefighting and rescue demonstration at the Viaduct Basin in the inner harbour. Cool! Not only that, but we were going to be filmed by a Korean TV crew for some sort of adventure show they have there. Originally we were supposed to have a famous Korean TV star on board with us, but he stupidly had his flight delayed, so they stupidly decided to film us anyway and dub him in later as a voice-over.

Anyway, we got together a bunch of off-duty people to act as obnoxious drunken losers. This was surprisingly easy. :-) They paddled an overloaded boat into the Basin, got tangled up in the middle of a model-boat race that was going on, yelled incoherently at the crowd for a while, pretended to drink a lot out of supposedly empty beer cans (but I have my suspicions), set fire to their boat, and fell overboard. Then we came in with North Harbour Rescue (which is the main rescue vessel equipped for firefighting), put out the fire, and pulled the guys out of the water.

Interestingly, many of the crowd were apparently stupid enough to think the whole thing was real, in spite of the fact that there were two TV crews filming us and a man in a Coastguard uniform explaining through the Viaduct's sound system what we were going to do next and why. :-)

One of the "obnoxious drunken losers" had instructions to be obnoxious enough to resist being rescued from drowning, which he did with great enthusiasm, as a result of which I have a big bruise on my arm. (He apologised later, explaining that he had actually been trying to hit Wayne but I got in the way. Gosh, thanks.) We got revenge later, when he was pretending to be unconscious and was expecting to be pretend-resuscitated for the cameras. Instead we declared him to be a hospital case, wrapped him in a sheet, and tied him to a stretcher so he couldn't move. Then we unloaded him onto a dock and left him there. Hehehehe. The North Harbour people went and let him go after 15 minutes or so. :-)

After that we just had normal stupidity for the rest of the day. Some of it was pretty stupid, though. One of the highlights was towing home three guys, on their first trip in a brand new boat, with brand new lifejackets and fishing gear, and a brand new very expensive outboard motor which they had used just long enough to get them out to deep water, after which it fell off the back of the boat and sank. :-)

We also had a call from a member of the public that there was a sinking boat with people in the water, on the rocks outside Ladies' Bay. This is Auckland's nudist beach, due to being surrounded by steep cliffs and enough offshore reefs to make it impossible for people to drive by on land or in boats and perv at the sunbathers. Unless you have a shallow-draft boat like the Coastguard ones, of course, and are accustomed to going in amongst reefs. I really did feel extremely stupid as we cruised by slowly, all with binoculars focused, convinced that there were going to be some complaints laid against Coastguard today. :-) The "sinking boat" turned out to be a broken-down jet boat, whose owner stupidly claimed to be able to fix the motor any second now. He turned out to be wrong but stupidly insisted we should go away and let him keep trying. The tide was going in and he wasn't going to end up anywhere but back on the beach anyway, so after hanging around for an hour or so we left him to his delusions.

We had about four other tow jobs and a job bringing a couple of little boys back to shore after their parents' boat was dismasted and the slow trip back was making them chronically seasick. So that's what I did on Stupid Day. I even took some more photos for my web site, which will be there in the next day or so. Maybe even today, if I get around to it.

Brunnen-"whew, longest post ever"G