Eyes Above The Waves

Today a friend of ours was baptised. Being a tramping, outdoorsy kind of guy he wanted to get baptised in the Piha Stream out on the west coast near Auckland. Great idea, but today turned out to be windy, wet and cold. Thus twenty-odd of us ended up trudging along a muddy, boggy track in the rain for half an hour to get to the ideal spot. Actually, since we were dressed well, it was a lot of fun! I'm glad we had a good excuse to do something crazy like that :-).

On the way there, we stopped at Piha beach. The wind was blowing in hard at high tide and I've never seen it so wild. The surf was roaring, with waves and white foam running hundreds of metres offshore. Waves were hitting the rocks hard, throwing up towering plumes of spray. It was utterly awesome in the best sense of the word.

On the beach there were a lot of very strange blue organisms that I'm pretty sure I've never seen before. They looked a lot like little blue water balloons with a stringy organic appendage. Furthermore they felt just like balloons --- the same feeling when squeezed, the same immediate return to their original shape when released, as if containing water or air under pressure. And when I stepped on one, it popped loudly. I'm not even sure if these were plants, or perhaps some variety of anenome or jellyfish, although part of them looked like it might once have been attached to the sea floor. Perhaps they contained water under pressure because they live fairly deep, and the storm happened to wash them up. Whatever they were, it was quite remarkable.