Waiheke for a day

Yesterday on Waiheke island I rode my scooter down to tranquil Rocky Bay. I spied a good parking space, but was aware of a guy sitting nearby at a picnic table smoking a cigarette and gazing at the bay. I parked there anyway, and as I turned off the ignition he said, “good to have a scooter to look around the island.” I replied, "yeah, you can have your tranquility back now." He didn’t seem too fussed. I sat down at the table and started devouring my supermarket pizza, and as we talked he pointed to schools of baitfish close to shore. His kayak with fishing rod inserted lay at the water’s edge less than 10 metres from where we sat, and he said that at high tide he can pop open the sunroof and catch a snapper from his car, which I thought was a bit dismissive of the beautiful surroundings. “Drive-thru fishing”, I joked.
I asked him if he knew Sam McLean, an old Scottish guy who lived in Rocky Bay and owned a 50-foot yacht that I crewed aboard to Fiji in 1993. He didn’t know. That was a long time ago now.
“What do you do on the mainland?”, he asked me. “All sorts of things”, I replied, “cheese gives me really weird dreams.” At first I thought he was joking when he told me his job, but as he went on I knew he was for real. For a sea captain I thought his glasses looked too trendy, and he looked too young and homeless, but maybe that’s just the dress code in Rocky Bay. He explained that oil companies pay $500,000 a day for offshore seismic surveying, and that, with its eight-mile-long lines trailing from the stern of the ship, pilot boat out front and rear-guard boat, his get-up is the largest moving object on earth. “Oil companies think nothing of the cost - for every dollar spent they get 20 dollars back”, he added, relighting his exotic cigarette. He pointed to his recreational craft, a 23-foot yacht moored out in the bay, which he’d bought for $1800 in the Bay of Islands and taken a week to sail home due to a lack of wind. He'd had to motor the whole way. I had more island to see, so with a full tank of vegetarian pizza I hopped on my scooter and buzzed off.