Yesterday was great. It was the annual paintball war between Coastguard and the Surf Lifesaving guys. Historically, they always win, which they think gives them the right to jeer at us and say we're soft because we have boats instead of having to swim out to people on surf beaches. Conversely, we feel we have the right to jeer at THEM because, when you consider the whole situation objectively and rationally, they're dorks. ;-)

Anyway, 26 people went out to Bethells Beach in West Auckland, and spent four hours running around a pine forest like loonies wearing camouflage gear and helmets and shooting each other with paintball guns (which HURT), and it was great, and best of all COASTGUARD WON!!!!! The final score was us 400, them 390, instead of the traditional "them several million, us nothing" described by previous players. To make it even better, apparently the surf guys were irritated about losing to a team with two girls on it. :-)

We played a whole lot of short fast games over the four hours. Each team started from different sides of the forest (swapping sides each game) and the idea was to reach the flag in the middle for a certain amount of points, and hang it on the enemy's pole for more points. The terrain was really different depending on what side of the forest you had. The better side had a lot of hills, trenches and cover. The other side was basically a straight open slope and apart from the trees there was pretty much no cover at all. Once you got hit you were out for that game.

Anyway, that was the first time I've played paintball, and it's really fun. I can't say I was a tremendous asset to the team, unlike my boyfriend who actually captured the flag in one game, but my personal best part was when I managed to hold a position by myself against five guys for quite some time, and I think I actually got three of them before the last two got me in a hail of paintballs. (Ow, ow, ow.) Also, the bit where a surf guy and I bumped into each other while we were both crawling backwards around the same bit of hill was pretty cool. It had that real John-Woo-action-movie feeling. It was a hectic one or two seconds of startlement, and one of those Hollywood standoffs where you're both pointing a gun in each other's face and wondering who's going to be faster, then we both fired at the same time, but he hadn't cleaned his gun out and it JAMMED!!! Bwa ha ha ha! Then I got to feeling all guilty about shooting a guy in the face at point blank range. Oh well, that's what the helmets are for, I guess. It still knocked him right off his feet, though, and he was a bit woozy for a while.

Anyway, four hours of running around and falling down holes and diving into flax bushes and piles of twigs isn't all fun and games (ha) and today I have a pulled muscle in my neck, scratches all over my left arm, a HUGE bruise that goes pretty much halfway around my right arm, a similar two taking up most of my left thigh, one on my shoulder, one on my knee, and various other ones which I'm sure will surface in the next few days. One of the guys was kind enough to haul his pants down and show me one on his hip from last year's war, which he STILL HAS. Yeesh. (And, er, I could have done without seeing half your butt, too, but thanks anyway. ;-)

We left with a promise to do it all again next year, and also a promise that the final scoresheet would be faxed to Surf headquarters every hour on the hour for the entire following week... what a great day.

Brunnen-"if they'd let us bring along the Coastie who used to be in the French Foreign Legion, and the Coastie who's currently in the SAS, the final score would have been WAY better ;-)"G