A new bach

Somehow over the break I managed to buy a new holiday home. We  spotted it while on a walk one evening at Kakanui and went for a look the next day and ended up putting an offer in. Being an unintended purchase it has meant we’ve spent quite a bit of time tidying up our current bach and getting it ready to sell. We enjoy the place we have, it is sunny and secluded and is a proper bach, no flashy modern holiday home here; it's pretty basic but a great spot to relax but if we were to live in it long term it would need some major renovations- I had an draftsmen teed up start drawing up some plans for an additional bedroom the day after we found the new place. 

The new place is a modern (holiday/family) home-  (iits only a few years old and has all the mod cons you'd expect). It’s on the seaward side of Kakanui and has great views over over the northern beach and Kakanui river mouth. I am buying it with an eye to the future, intending it as a place for us to move down to and live in permanently (sooner hopefully rather than later). In the short term though we’ll rent it out and maybe aim is to set it up as a holiday home rental with book-a-bach for next summer (probably from round Oct).

We went unconditonal and put the deposit on it this week so now just have to wait till the official purchase date at the ed of February. 

Kakanui- the surf beach (Campbell's bay) is at the bottom of the shot and is about 4km of golden sand and great surf. 

The new place.

It's also about a 250m-300m walk down the hill to the surf beach.  Now all I need to do is sell our current bach to get the mortgage back down to a reasonable level.

 Craig

Teaching the kids to surf

I first started surfing back in the early 1990s but gave up about  1995 when  I got into white water kayaking instead. When the kids came along I no longer had the spare time for kayaking either so for the past decade or so have mainly been using my playboat for surf-kayaking and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been on a river in the past few years.

Looking south from Kakanui towards Moeraki

 Over the past 3-4 summers the kids have been doing plenty of boogie boarding at Kakanui and for the past year or so Finn has been asking me to get him a surfboard. At the end of last summer one of my soccer mates gave Finn one of his old boards so he has been very keen to get started. Finn gave it a go the last time we were at Kakanui but wasn’t too successful (he quickly realised it is harder than it looks) and wanted some help. I'd been thinking about getting back into surfing so while we were in Blenheim for his soccer tournament I caught up with a mate who I’d given my old surfboard and arranged to get it back. I picked up the board when I was in CHCH for Conquest but one look at it I realised I’d be struggling to use a short board these days so last week I bought myself a 7’ 9” mini-mal - short enough to be able to control pretty easily, long enough to be able stand up on without too many issues and have “loaned” my short board to Hana to learn on.  

Kakanui- not a bad spot really!

  I took the kids out both yesterday and today and they had a blast. Both were able to get onto their knees and it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be standing. It took me awhile but I managed to catch a few waves. By the end of today Hana had, very briefly, managed to stand a couple of times.  They’ve bruised knees, arms and legs from being hit by the boards but both are rearing to go again next weekend. Tonight they spent their time watching how to surf vids on Youtube to get a few more tips. I’m not sure if they will stick with it, at this stage it looks like they might. They spent about 6 hours in the water over 2 days (not bad since they only have spring suits and the water is a “tropical” 14 degrees celcius!) and were both absolutely buzzing once we’d finished. Surfing is a great sport, so I hope they get bitten by the surfing bug and stick with it. There are a hell of a lot worse things they could be doing.

Alas, this isn't me.

Craig