I had to get online to post this story because it's just too cool to wait until after the weekend.

I was supposed to be flying today with the Air Patrol but it was a *nasty* day. I didn't see much point in going out to the airfield at all because you can't fly in this sort of weather. So I headed off there thinking, "Yawn, another thrilling day of sitting around reading six-year-old aviation magazines in the pilots' lounge until it's rained long enough that we can get permission to go home again."

After a couple of hours, however, the rain stopped and the clouds lifted just enough to make flying possible. So we figured we might as well go up for an hour or however long it took before everything turned horrible again. We got told to do a circuit of Waiheke Island and count how many boats were around that area, so off we went. There weren't any. It was boring. If you think counting boats is boring, then counting boats when there are no boats to count is even more boring. It tends to be like "THERE'S ONE!! See?! See?! Write it down! OK, how many is that in total for this side of the island?" "Er... one."

After spending some time looking for non-existent boats so we could count them, we saw what looked like a *huge* flock of birds working over a school of fish in the distance. So we went to look at that. It turned out to be well worth the effort.

It was what's called a meatball of fish, a huge round ball of them. The size and shape of the meatball is really obvious from the air. There were hundreds upon hundreds of gulls and gannets diving on them frantically and the water was *boiling* with activity over maybe a hundred square feet.

We got to the meatball at the same time as the dolphins. They were coming from everywhere, streaking towards this big free lunch in groups of five, ten or twenty. There were over a hundred dolphins but I don't know how many exactly -- we should have tried to count them but it was just too fast and frantic. The surface of the water, as we circled above, had the appearance of a giant white wheel. The boil-up of fish and birds was at the centre and the dolphins were converging on it from every point of the compass, their white wakes making the spokes of the wheel.

I was hoping there might be some orca or whales turning up too, but we only saw dolphins. They were common dolphins, which are quite small, with grey and black bodies. Seeing them from above, the way they curve through the water and the incredible speed they travel at, was a wonderful experience.

We circled around watching until the meatball had been mostly eaten or dispersed and the dolphins started to head away again in their separate groups.

I wondered how they all knew, to turn up from such long distances and head straight to the fish like that. They must be able to communicate and sense things in the water from much further away than I ever thought.

Anyway, it just goes to show how good a bad day can turn out. After the fun was over, we went back to counting boats, and the weather turned pitch dark and started pouring up-down-and-sideways again about half an hour after we landed, so it was really very lucky that the break in the weather came exactly when it did.

Brunnen-"the final result of the boat count was 538, in case anybody wondered"G