Clive is Alive!

I am a total slacker at the moment and haven't posted for weeks. I spent the last ten days in Fiji working as a volunteer with the Mako Club so we'll start with that and go in picture day order. There may be a gap on one of the days as I inadvertently 'moved' a hundred or so instead of 'copying' and am now waiting for a disk to arrive from Fiji with the moved pictures on. Silly me.

The first weekend was spent in Suva at the national championships. It's a three hour drive and follows the usual interesting country drives - cows wandering across the road, drivers falling asleep when coming towards you, just normal stuff. I placed myself under a tent at the meet but my legs still got totally fried from the sun reflecting off the water!

They run all events as timed finals with all ages and both genders combined so each event ranged from little 5 year old girls to big, hairy, 50+ year old men! One club didn't like that fact that the event order had been changed after the entries were submitted and decided to boycott the first evening by sitting in their van in the carpark.

The lane ropes were somewhat slack and looked as it they'd been chewed by a tractor. The timekeepers were local student volunteers who I don't think had timed before; one lane had a five second difference between two watches!!

Evenings were excellent with party-time being the order of the day and with the Nadi (pronounced Nandi) Mako Club parents leading the way :)

The drive back to Nadi on the Sunday took rather longer as we stopped off for three hours for lunch at one of the swimmers' grandparents place; all very civilised and happy.