With the Tournament starting to get underway under way tomorrow afternoon I wanted to give my gear a thorough test out after I noticed my main lens has developed a new fault where it seems to work for a while then drops dead without warning when I go to take a shot. This seems to happen when the temperature rises. Would be a curse for events like specialty where I only get one chance at the shot and can’t back away far enough to use my alternative, a long lens.
Anyway, I thought this morning I’d better give all my gear a good thrashing and get some more some practice with my telephoto lens.
The sun was full on and the air crystal clear with the haze gone so far today.
After a while I kidded some of the guys to work with me to get some “creative” shots of them working out. It was fun and we’ll let you judge the results.
During the day I changed my main lens over to my older camera and it seems to be working fine on it so that was good to figure out.
Today lots of other teams have arrived and the town scene this afternoon has changed from the predominant 60’s-70’s retired couple tourists to groups of young Taekwon-do people.
We thought that other teams would be joining us at Hotel Liberty but none have which is a shame because it has been a bit lonely with only 11 of us since last Friday. Christine Young arrived this afternoon so we’re now 12. In retrospect, if they weren’t putting other teams in our hotel it would have been good to have the other kiwis here too. Steve Pellow’s group have about a 1k walk to the venue, whereas we have only about 100m. Our hotel appears to be the closest.
It’s now 6 pm and our guys have headed out for a walk around the town… they’re really hungry, most doing a starve now until weigh in for juniors in the morning and seniors in the afternoon. Wandering around takes their minds off their hunger. Most of our group are within 0-0.5kg of their target weight so are pretty well prepared. The hotel have been doing well on the food front with only a handful of us turning up over the last few days for some of the meals. Three meals a day are part of the package.
However, they’re really looking forward to a major food blitz tomorrow night. The restaurant staff will find it pretty odd!
The ITFNZ officials have all arrived (Kris Herbison and Mark Banicevich yesterday and Darren Ward today).
The waiting is getting hard and we’re ready and keen to get it all underway.
Today's fun and games...
