Tea with an engineer

Saturday, January 16, 2010     Whangerei, New Zealand

Thursday, Jan 14, we drove from Piha back through Auckland and then north into what is called The Northland.  On the way to a B&B in Whangerei we stopped at a beach on Bream Bay adjacent to the Marsden Point Petroleum Refinery.  This is the only oil refinery in New Zealand, and includes a deep-water port and ocean tanker unloading facilities.  While we were sitting there admiring the view and wondering what the facility out on the point was, we met Tony and Shiela.  We talked with them for a while, and they told us the background of the area, and then invited us over to their home 200 meters away for tea.  Tony is a British electrical engineer who was recruited to come to New Zealand 35 years ago to work in a fuel-oil fired power plant adjacent to the refinery.  He was the chief engineer in the power plant until it closed a few years ago - - it no longer made economic sense to burn the oil for electricity when they could make more by converting it to gasoline.  In his younger days Tony built a 50-foot sailing yacht in his back yard!