Don't throw those bloody spears at me.

Posted on Tuesday 16 December 2008 at 04:31 - Post Comment

Apparently Michael Caine never said those words, in Zulu, or any other film.  Still love the phrase though! 

So what does that have to do with the price of old cheese?  Well read on, and all will be revealed!

T gave me my Chrissy present early you see.  As we are heading up to Kaikoura shortly, it was deemed suitable to do so as it was related to this adventure.  So there's me last night - get home from work and the big old pressie is sat there looking at me expectantly.

I savour the moment for a little longer, and go and change out of my work gear, and then get into the serious work of unwrapping it.

Imagine my absolute suprise to find that T's only gone and got me a f*cking great spear gun!  This thing is well over a metre long, and looks pretty handy.  It's basically a big elastic band attached to a pole, that fires a metre of pointy steel rod at a great rate of knots at whatever it has been aimed at.  The rod is attached to the pole by 4 metres of cable, so it has a range of over 5 metres.  After 10 minutes of figuring out how it all works, we head out to the back garden to give it a bash.  I manage to arm the thing as the elastic bungee doo-dad is SO strong my weedy arms can hardly pull it back far enough.  Point it down the garden and....

...very nearly put the spear through my leg!!!  At this point T realises that the gift - though seemingly a good idea at the time - is now obviously completely inappropriate for someone as incompetent and downright accident prone as myself.  You see, on that first firing the spear took milliseconds to come to the end of its tether, and Einstein being right when he said that every action has a reaction, it immediately boinged back at me with the super sharp pointy end ripping a hole in my jeans just inches from my manly bits.  Another few mm's the wrong way and it would have gone through my entire leg!

After this shock I did a few, more carefully orchestrated, test shots and have come to the conclusion that this thing is positively lethal.  It went through over an inch of plywood with no trouble at all. 

So, if I don't update this blog after a weekend of spearfishing in Kaikoura, then you know that what everyone saw coming has happened and I'll be in A&E.

So this thing fires lethal projectiles, has the potential to kill and maim, is legal to use, and is all mine.  What a BLOODY FANTASTIC PRESENT!  I bloody love my wife.