We loved Sheep World! And yes – I got to shear a sheep! Not exactly the entire sheep – but I got a few good swaths in. I just don’t have any pictures to show for it though. The camera man was having some technical difficulties at the time – such as turning the video record off instead of on. But I do have witnesses and a clump of sheep wool to show for it.


The Stage - Waiting for the Show to Begin!

The sheep show was 90 minutes long and included sheepdogs rounding up the sheep from out in the pasture and bringing them into the barn.

Bringing the sheep to the barn


And into the pen for shearing

They covered everything from how the dogs were trained to what a typical day is like for a sheep sheerer. They train the dogs to have only one master. That person is the only one that pets them, rewards them and feeds them. They start by learning voice commands, and once that is mastered they move onto whistle commands – so they can be controlled from long distances. Each dog will have their own unique set of words and whistle sounds they learn for the same set of a commands. That way a sheepdog handler can use more than one dog at the same time. It also means the sheepdog handler also has to remember all the various words and whistle sounds for each dog – it can get complicated! A well trained dog can be worth up to $5000 dollars – not bad considering how much work they do over the course of their 16-17 year life span.


Putting the sheep into a very relaxed state so it doesn't struggle during shearing. It can hardly hold itself up!


Lisa getting some instructions before taking on the shears. Sorry - no other photos - will have to go back and do it again!


Waking the sheep back up after her haircut.

Sheep shearing itself is hard work! Typical shearers will shear 300-400 sheep in a day. After my 1 minute attempt at shearing, I would be lucky to do 3-4 in a day, and lucky to do it without drawing lots of blood! Shearers actually do their best to relax the sheep so they are easier to work with. He had me hold the sheep right between my knees, using my left hand to bend its head over the side, and my right hand to run the shears. I sheared a few rows, but was afraid to get too close to the skin – I didn’t want to draw blood. When I was done, my pants and hands were quite oily (and smelly) from all the lanolin in the wool. I smelled real nice in the car on the drive to Auckland!

From Sheep World we took our time driving the east coast south towards Auckland. We ended up spending the night in Devonport, a suburb just across the bay from downtown Auckland.


View to downtown Auckland from Devonport.


Devonport's waterfront

It’s a cute little town with lots of shops and restaurants. We ate dinner at a pub, and I ordered my first full-fledged meal of green-lipped mussels – a New Zealand staple. I made it through most of them, once I picked the tendony parts off. I won’t be ordering that again, but at least I gave it my best shot.


My first, and last, meal of Green Lipped Mussels

We stayed on through the evening at the pub as it was Quiz Night – and the place was packed. It is a very popular past-time at pub’s throughout NZ. People gather up in teams (from 1 to however many), and answer sets of 10 questions in 8 different categories. It was our first time playing, and we STUNK! Came in dead last. Thank goodness some friendly kiwi’s helped with a few ‘very kiwi’ questions, but we still bombed. We’ll be looking for another quiz night here in Whangarei just to see if we can’t shoot for second to last.


View from hill in Devonport to Auckland the next morning


And another gorgeous view


And just one more of sailboats in the distance

The next day we drove into downtown Auckland where Viaduct Harbor is located, and made a reservation for a slip here starting on 1 May. John’s brother Walt will be joining us on 6 May, so that will make it easy for him to get to the boat and we can spend a few days showing him around town and gradually get him settled back into boat life. We also found a great store called Martha’s Backyard where they sell lots of US products – like Skippy Peanut Butter!!, and Ortega’s Whole Green Chilis!!, and Guacamole Mix!!! You know – the things you just can’t do without! So we bought 2 boxes full of goodies, and I am sure we will need one last run by there before we make the passage onto Fiji in May.

So that was our little road trip last week. A nice relaxing little getaway.