Wind Rain and the end of Summer

Well, the last day of summer is upon us already.  It’s official, after nearly 2 years of summer we are finally going to experience autumn and winter again.  OK, not winter like Canada but still MUCH colder than we have been used to.  Just to emphasise the point, we are getting nailed today with 40 knot winds, driving rain and all that fun stuff.  It’s nice to be tied up to a nice sheltered marina.  We continue to grind away looking for work.  It has been a bit weird of late.  A couple of weeks ago I received 2 emails from Vodafone HR saying they understood how frustrated I must be and they were apologizing about not briefing me on a role I had applied for.  The bottom line was a offer to meet with the HR person to find out more about the role.  Great I thought, I’ll give this person a call.  Of coursed, no answer, so I left a message.  No return call was forthcoming so I sent an email off the next morning, no response.  Another phone call that afternoon (we are now up to Tuesday afternoon), no answer, so I leave another message.  One more email Wednesday which finally got a terse response that my CV had been forwarded to another person and they would contact me if they wanted to see me.  It was a VERY strange apology to say the least.  I sent one last email off to the head of the PM group yesterday to see if I could get a response.  I’ll wait and see what happens.  I did get a call from Telecom NZ about a training specialist role I applied for and I had a video conference interview yesterday.  It went well, I think.  I will find out next week just how well it went.  It’s an interesting job and a good entrance to Telecom.  The other high point is that we have finally confirmed a permanent live aboard berth here in Auckland.  As of April 1^st we are moving across the harbour to Bayswater Marina.  It will be nice to be settled and get an address at last.  There is a ferry that runs across the harbour from the marina to the downtown core.  If I get the job with Telecom, I may use that to get to work instead of fighting traffic.  I’ll have to work out the costs involved and see if it’s worth it or not.

Heat, Rain, Humidity and WINZ

32.4 degrees in Auckland Thursday, the warmest it’s been here since 1872.  Even the wind felt warm, but less warm than sitting in the sun.  We haven’t been up to much this week except looking for work and trying to keep busy.  We had our friends Tony and Helen and their family, Jonathon and Sarah down on Sunday for a leisurely sail on the harbour and a BBQ after.  All in all a very relaxing day.  Not a lot of wind but we did sail a bit so it was worth it.  I spent Saturday cleaning up the mooring lines and pick up lines for our berth.  We don’t actually tie up to a finger like we have in the past, instead we are stern in against the main dock and there are two pilings, one on either side of the bow that we tie off to.  The idea is you attach permanent lines to the pilings then pick them up as you back in past them.  What you end up doing is attaching a small diameter, floating line to the mooring line, then that is attached at the main dock end to the stern line.  In order to keep the whole thing out of the way when you leave the dock, you attach a counterweight through a pulley on the piling and in theory that pulls the lines out of the way.  When we arrived last week, the lines were a mess and hadn’t been used for some time.  I removed all the old lines Saturday and replaced them with our own lines, fixed the counterweight system and generally made it so we could easily get in and out of the berth.  We got to test it on Sunday and other than a couple of wee adjustments, it all works well.

We also managed to get our unemployment benefit sorted out finally.  We had an appointment on Monday for a Search for Work Seminar at the local WINZ office.  We got in to the seminar and were told to look for 3 jobs in the lists they had supplied that we could apply for then wait to meet with a counsellor to work through them.  As we were not yet receiving an unemployment benefit, I though maybe I should ask what was going on.  I called the seminar leader over and asked what exactly we were supposed to be doing here.  He started to explain that as a condition of continuing to receive our benefit we had to apply for work through the seminar.  I politely informed him that perhaps he was making an unwarranted assumption, i.e that we were actually receiving a benefit.  He looked a bit surprised and went to check our status on the system.  It turned out we were not actually on the system (we knew this but of course he didn’t).  He then asked if we had attended the initial seminar where we were informed of our obligations about finding work etc that we were required to attend BEFORE submitting the application.  I again politely walked through all that we had gone through at this point with WINZ.  He asked how we had seen initially, I handed him the business card of the seminar leader for the initial seminar that we had attended.  He then asked if we had submitted our application and had it vetted.  I handed him the business card of the next person we had seen to get the application sorted out.  He took both cards a trundled off to check into it.  It turned out that there was absolutely no record on the system, no notes on file, nothing, of our attendance at the initial seminar, our subsequent meeting with the case worker in Kerikeri or anything else for that matter, other than our address change that we had registered with them last week.  He managed to get hold of the case worked in Kerikeri, Hori, who told him he was swamped with work but that he had some “processing time” that afternoon and that our file would be dealt with that afternoon and that we would be sorted out by Tuesday AM.  When we were told this, Cathy and I both smiled and politely informed the case worker in Auckland that we had been promised that before and nothing happened.   He gave us his card and said that if nothing had happened by Wednesday to call him.  Remember this was Monday afternoon.  OK, Tuesday, nothing, Wednesday morning, nothing so on the phone again and informed Gary (our Auckland case manager) that nothing had happened.  He was most displeased and promised to call me back.  We had a few calls back and forth to make sure he had the complete and accurate story then managed to get hold of the office in Kerikeri.  He first tried to call our case manager in Kerikeri, Hori, and got as message saying he was unavailable.  Gary then called the next person in line and got the same message.  He then called the manager in Kerikeri and found out that Hori was at the manager’s desk.  When he talked to Hori, he asked what had happened.  Gary was once again told by Hori that he was swamped with work and the application still had not been entered but that there was a woman who was going to be entering data and he would put ours on top of the pile.  Thursday morning I just about fell of the seat at the nav table when I checked our accounts and we had received the money they had promised.  Although we got sorted out by applying gentle but consistent pressure on the system, what about all the others that had applications lying on this guys desk that had no been dealt with.  We are fortunate in that we were not destitute.  There were a lot of other people in Kerikeri that were severely unemployed.  I hope that they got their benefits sorted out as well. 

So Friday came and friends from Opua were coming in town to check out the Louis Vuitton racing so we bummed around with them most of the day and checked out the race village.  If it stops raining today, we will wander over and check out the action.  The series is almost done so this will likely be the last weekend of racing.

Waitangi Day 2009

We sailed south to Auckland from Opua on Tuesday.  We left with a forecast of NE to E winds which although not ideal looked not too bad.  What the forecasters meant to say was ESE to SE winds, which became obvious after we rounded cape Brett and could barely make our course to weather.  We motor sailed in light winds and by 20:15, the winds strengthened enough for us to sail and we had a good sail to weather for most of the night.  The winds lightened again around 04:00 and we motor sailed ther rest of the way.  We were tied up in Westhaven by 13:00, a total of 27 hours from dock to dock and 139 miles.  Not too bad.  The marina here is a bit more spread out than Opua but surprisingly pretty quiet, considering we are in the middle of Auckland.  We do here city noises bit they are not intrusive.  Yesterday I took the bus back up to Opua to get the car.  I left at 08:30 and was back on the boat by 16:30.  The bus ride up was great, I got to see a lot more than when we drive, it was a nice tall bus!

We got up this morning, Waitangi Day, for you non NZers, the agreement that formed New Zealand, otherwise known as the Treaty of Waitangi, was signed in 1843.  It is a peaceful celebration of cultures coming together, at lease now it is.  There was a big due hosted by Auckland City Council and Ngati Whatua o Orakei.  We spent a few hours listening to music, wandering around and getting throroughly baked in the hot sun before we gave up and came back to the boat.  All in all a pretty busy week.  Cathy has a job interview on Wednesday and I am still chasing a job on the North Shore.  Hopefully we can get something happening sooner rather than later.  WINZ still has not seen fit to complete the process required to get the Unemployment Benefit.  Don’t really know what the holdup is but we have another meeting on Monday with the WINZ office here in Auckland and should get it straightened out then.