Auckland skippers - Jim Mitchell on 'Koraki'

I first met Jim fifteen years ago when he was a trawler skipper, and ran into him regularly at the Tepid Baths spa pool, bleary-eyed and warming up after several days at sea. Now he's skipper on the tug 'Koraki' which is moored at Bledisloe Wharf. I clambered down a five metre steel ladder onto the heaving deck of the tug on a rainy winter day in a pair of black brogues. I hadn't quite prepared for the meeting.

“When the container shop 'Rina' wrecked on a reef off Mount Maunganui we were sent down to mop up the oil spill. We also tried to get as many containers off the ship as we could before they were washed into the sea. 

"Right now we're towing a big barge up to Whangarei twice a week to pick up 2000 tonnes of cement for the Auckland building industry. Tomorrow I’ll be up 3.30am for a 5am departure from Auckland. It's a twelve hour sail up the coast.

"I first went to sea at the age of 14 as a deck hand. I liked the life ... seeing whales and dolphins in summer between Little Barrier and Cape Rodney … I got my skipper's ticket when I was 19 and my first job was running a Danish Seiner. My Dad had been a Danish Seiner fisherman working out of Auckland before me. And now my son Nick is a First Mate on a tug in Darwin running supplies up to Aboriginal communities in the far north of Queensland.


'Koraki' mops up oil from the wreck of the 'Rina'

"On ‘Koraki’ we have a crew of five, First Mate, Engineer and two deck hands. If the wind is from the north-east it can be pretty uncomfortable … and above 25-30 knots we don’t sail.

"Recently on the Whangarei cement run we had a fire in the port engine at 2am just off Pakiri Beach, and had to abandon ship. Toxic fumes were coming off the engine and it was so out of control there was a risk of it exploding. We were in a 25 knot sou'wester with rain, so it wasn’t too comfortable in the life raft. We were picked up by the Coast Guard from Whangarei and the good old NZ Navy extinguished the flames … so we were back on board by 10am the next morning.

"Sometimes when we're out to sea, we get worse weather than is predicted … 40-50 knot wind behind you with a 2,000 tonne barge behind can be a trial. In the stronger weather we let out the tow line further to absorb the strain.

Tango for Nepal

My dance partner Rea Jarai and I performed at a fund-raiser for the earthquake victims in Nepal recently. We chose two classic tango tracks ... 'Que Falta Que Me Haces' and 'Desde el Alma', plus a modern piece by the Gotan Project ... A hundred folks at the Grey Lynn Community Centre gave us a lovely reception ...

Tango was born in the waterfront slums of Buenos Aires at the turn of the 19th century ... and is a melancholic dance full of yearning, tales of lost love, and nostalgia for the home-land. It was developed by southern European settlers of Argentina and first danced by pairs of men, such was the shortage of women in the city at the time.

The audience was also treated to a Nepalese theatre troupe, modern folk singer Kiri, a Latin jazz combo, a whacky fashion show, and some wild clowns led by Bhadrakari, one of the leaders of the Auckland Buddhist Centre - who had organised the event. Scotty, an Aussie didgeridoo player was broken hearted on the night because his two metre wooden instrument split from one end to the next shortly before the event. Auckland weather conditions no doubt.

Half the $4000 raised went to the Auckland Buddhist Centre, who organised the evening, and who provided a ravishing vegetarian banquet and light-hearted and upbeat compering.

Whale wars ...

The Sea Shepherd vessel Sam Simon is currently moored at Princes Wharf, downtown Auckland, where the Creative Hub writing centre is located. Shepherd's campaign to stop Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean made for one of the more enthralling reality TV series of recent years. The series featured helicopter tracking, collisions and sinkings, and a variety of other guerrilla tactics against the whalers. After an International Court of Justice ruling early in 2014, the Japanese have called a halt to killing whales. Their explanation that they were taking whales for 'research purposes' was widely regarded as a sham.

Sea Shepherd can claim credit for exposing the Japanese actions, which have their origins in a complex set of cultural and historical mores, and a desire not to lose face by backing down to Western and international pressure.

French sailor Antoine (clip below) told me the Sam Simon's next mission was a campaign to stop the illegal fishing of the Antarctic tooth-fish in the Southern Ocean. Antoine said Spanish boats sailing anonymously under flags of convenience are plundering the stocks of this remarkable deep water fish which can live up to about fifty years, and reach a length of more than two metres. There is furious debate going on between fishers and conservation groups, with Greenpeace having recently placed the tooth-fish on their red list of protected fish species.

Volcanoes I have known ...

Speaking of active volcanos (see previous post) ... in a fit of madness, I once made a pledge to climb each of the eight mountainous volcanic Aeolian Islands off the north coast of Sicily.

A wonderful, evocative archipelago, the group consists of a loose assortment of mountains poking their heads out of the Mediterranean. They include the verdant Lipari; Vulcano, where you can immerse yourself in warm bubbling volcanic mud to cure your skin ailments, and the only continuously erupting volcano in Europe, Stromboli.

The eight islands have been created by the violent tectonic movement of the African continental crust against the European crust. Believe me, it's hot down there. Stromboli features in the climactic scenes of Jules Verne's 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth'.

After a night ascent of the 900 metre volcano, I bedded down on its rim with a group of Germans, to watch the gouts of ejected lava, a spectacular display of glowing scarlet that never ceased. The warmth attracted rats the size of guinea pigs, their silhouettes stark against the eruption as they leapt over my sleeping bag. The warm black volcanic sand made for a surprisingly soft mattress ... but for obvious reasons, sleep didn't come easily.


Stromboli - Europe's only continuously erupting volcano

Ruapehu's moods ...

Skiing on Mount Ruapehu today, I recalled a visit in September 1995 on the day it decided to erupt, throwing ash up to 15,000 feet, and diverting air traffic throughout the North Island. My brother Tim looked at the summit on a ski run, 'Where has all that cloud come from?' he asked innocently. In fact lava was rapidly vaporising the crater lake, and sending up a plume that heralded a major eruption. Fine sandy, black ash fell on the surrounding countryside for weeks, destroying animal pastures and the surrounding ski fields. An acidic ash plume was blown hundreds of kilometres causing destructive surges in the national electricity grid.

My next ski visit to Ruapehu happened to be on September 11, 2001, another volcanic day of sorts, and I recall stumbling out into the lobby of the Skotel, and watching in disbelief as the Twin Towers collapsed. Another massive plume of smoke ... and by now, Ruapehu had begun to be associated with unexpected and catastrophic events, at least in my mind.

So it was with some trepidation that I visited this weekend, wondering what might happen ... As I write at 9pm (again from the Skotel) after having eaten my vegetarian pizza without incident, there are no reports of lahars sweeping down the mountain, or dramatic rises in the temperature of the crater lake.

Nine tips for great writing ...

How do you write stuff that people want to read?

Here are some conclusions I've come to over a life-time of writing and editing fiction and journalism.

First, care about your subject ... Passion is an over-used word, and the advertising industry exhorts us to feel passion about a variety of banal and pointless things ... (electronic gadgets, chain-saws, food mixers). But genuine enthusiasm about a subject is contagious, and if you feel deeply about something, write about it.

Second, focus on your authentic experience of that subject. Don't be afraid to use the 'I' word ... Your individual experience, rendered with integrity, passion and exactitude, has the potential to enthral thousands of others. Write about your concrete experience of that subject ... the sights, sounds, smells ... the visceral reality of the thing. Avoid the lofty abstraction, and accurately render the raw human experience.

'Visitors' was a collection of short stories based on growing up in the Waikato, and on my travels abroad. It was a book about love, death, obsession, and the tenacity of the human spirit. I'm passionately interested in those things, and left a little bit of my heart on every page.

Next, learn the craft. Since the first recorded narrative written several thousand years ago, 'Gilgamesh', writers have been perfecting the technical business of story-telling. Find a way to acquire the insights of accomplished writers who have gone before you.

This includes learning about the Hero's Journey, an ancient template that has great narrative power; how to write a well constructed scene with a beginning, rising action and climax; how to understand the three unities of time, place and action. You also need to know how to make your protagonist's predicament compelling; how to maximise dramatic power; and how to write sizzling dialogue that walks off the page.

Next, accept the reality of re-drafts. Every first draft of a story is flawed. Each time you re-draft a narrative, a mysterious process of improvement takes place. Most pieces of fiction go through multiple re-drafts, improving at each step of the way. Re-drafting isn't optional, it's essential!

Finally, have some fun ... The more you treat your writing as a process of playful enquiry and experimentation, the more likely you are to go back for the repeated visits necessary to produce a polished manuscript. Go for it!

White sharks at Muriwai

Encounters with sharks underwater in Tonga recently (see below) have caused me to reflect on these magnificent creatures, and the shark attack last year at Muriwai Beach, which killed film maker Adam Strange. I had taken a South Island friend swimming at Muriwai three days before the attack, and was struck by how the coroner's report, and the media generally had concluded that there was no way the death could have been prevented. Adam had been swimming in deep water between the gannet colony and Oaia Island, home to a thriving fur seal outpost.


Muriwai and Oaia Island at sunset ... (U Machold)

Fur seals are a staple of the great white shark diet. There are estimated to be at least a hundred great whites in Foveaux Strait at Stewart Island where seal colonies proliferate. In the 1990s, fur seals began to breed again in the North Island, after years of being hunted to near extinction, and Oaia Island is one of the few significant colonies here. Great whites migrate up to 3,300 km annually and it's a reasonable assumption they visit Oaia Island on the way. Water visibility at Muriwai is very low, which means sharks are invisible to us, and may cause sharks to mistake human swimmers for seals.



NIWA has tracked the migration routes of great whites using tags