> > After all that in one day, I had to get up early for my *normal* Coastguard duty which was all day Sunday from 9am to 9pm. That was another terrific day but I'll do that in another post.
>
> Brunnen-"unless everybody begs me to shut up after THIS one"G

Bwa ha ha, I'm not even going to give you the chance. Here goes with the Sunday story.

It was the day of a big long-distance swimming event and Coastguard had a heap of boats out to patrol that area and keep the traffic away from the swimmers. There were 459 competitors taking part in the swim, and all except one of them finished it. (One person decided to pull out immediately after the start, but I don't know why.) They were swimming across the width of Auckland Harbour, almost under the Harbour Bridge. That's away from commercial shipping, but there was still a lot of recreational boating going through the channel there. The boat I was on spent most of the time away from the main swim, intercepting boats that appeared to be heading for the area and turning them back. It was hectic. Also, you wouldn't believe the number of people who:

a) are apparently incapable of drawing the necessary conclusion from seeing a Coastguard boat cutting across to block their path, with strobe lights flashing and people on board holding up their hands for them to stop their boat. My skipper said we were allowed to ram boats to turn them away from the swimmers if the driver wouldn't stop. Not having been present at a harbour swim before, I thought he was joking. He wasn't. In the end, we never needed to, but there were a couple of times we came close to it.

b) *are* capable of drawing the necessary conclusion, stopping and being told politely that there is a cross-harbour swim going on, having 458 swimmers in the water pointed out to them (accompanied by kayaks, inflatable dinghies, and about twenty large boats forming a line on each side of the swimmers' path), agreeing that this is something which needs to be avoided, agreeing to turn south and go around behind the large white launch at the rear of the swim, thanking us politely, and then blissfully continuing in exactly the same direction they had been heading before.

The last swimmer took over two hours to complete the harbour crossing. All I could see from the boat was this little orange cap bobbing around in the waves and hardly moving forward at all. We were all betting on whether or not he (or she, as it turned out later) would pull out. Towards the end of the swim, she was only managing to swim a couple of strokes at a time, then stopping to float for several minutes. There were kayaks and inflatables all around her as escorts, so she wasn't in any danger, but I was convinced she was going to go under within the last few hundred metres from shore. It took forever for her to cover them.

As a guy on my crew commented, waving towards the Harbour Bridge, "Jeez, they could have just taken the bus."

After the swim was over, off we went to provide a presence at the Christmas barbecue for another division of Coastguard, which was being held on a big charter boat anchored nearby. It was the easiest day I've ever had. All we had to do was be there representing AR Alpha (the rescue vessel I crew on), and this turned out to involve lying in the sun on the top deck of the charter boat for four hours and eating free BBQ food. Gosh. It's a tough job, but you know somebody has to do it. We were still technically on duty, but we didn't get one single call-out to a job all day.

After *that* stressful task was over, we went back to base and sat around for another several hours in the sun on the marina pontoon and dangled our feet in the water and watched the fish and talked about nothing very much. This is when I heard two really cool things:

1) The hoax-distress-call guy who had been plaguing us for months had been caught, and
2) Apparently the crew I was on for this particular incident got nominated for some sort of "rescue of the year" award for it, an award which I wasn't even aware existed, and we didn't win it, but I thought that ruled, in a vague and unspecified sort of way.

At around 7pm we were advised that since nothing had happened all day, and nothing seemed likely to happen, we could refuel the boat and wash it up and go home early. So we did.

As the perfect end to a perfect day, I went out to my car in the carpark and found that my partner had been past earlier on the way to returning a video, and had left a single long-stemmed red rose under my windscreen wiper. I don't know about you, but that's the most romantic thing that's ever happened to me. *melt*

I got myself a pizza for dinner and that was the end of the most awesomely good weekend ever. I love summer.

Brunnen-"whew, long posts"G