When Kathy Cunningham at Empire Events asked me if I would like to provide the audio systems for the inaugural Seafood Festival I did not hesitate to say yes although it would mean operating at the extreme end of my comfort zone! It would involve four stages and while one of them was only a tin horn system used by Dick Hubbard for the blessing of the fleet the others would all need to be three way PAs. The biggest being our entire A rig situated on a large stage spread right across Jellico Street.
The second and smaller system was to be used in an upstairs car park in an area called the VIP lounge. This stage hosted such bands as Tom Sharplin, the Mermaids, the Warratahs and several other acts such as Miriam Clancy, Donald Reid, Andy Gibson and Carly Binding. They all played to a sell out crowd who paid $500 a table to be there. I asked Mike Dodds to engineer this stage and Paul Crowther  (see also this shot,) to do the Jellico St stage. Both these guys did a very good job and their overall performance was hard to fault.
It is always great working with Spacifix who are so easy to get a really good sound with and Nesian Mystic also provided some awesome entertainment for a massive sellout crowd who weren?t disappointed. (See also.) This band required four Shure Beta 58 radio mics that I did not own and rather than buy them at four grand a channel, I decided to be a bit creative and I purchased the Mipro UHF equivalents and employed an engineering company to make up some customised  thread adaptors for me. I then dismantled four new Shure Beta 58 hand helds and retro fitted the capsules and pop filters to the Mipro radio mic bodies. The result? No one knew the difference! The saving? Around $12,000! Ring me if you are interested in this. Other good acts to performe were Lady Six,  Voom and Many Hands.

We had basically a hitch free concert thanks to the two experienced engineers and a good stage management team put together by Kathy who together provided smooth changeovers with no hassles at all. I offer my sincere thanks to all who contributed on all three entertainment stages as these hard working people helped me make this extremely challenging task so much easier.

Bob Campbell whose acts on the Auckland City stage included Bel Bossa, fired on all six cylinders and did the setup on the three smaller stages almost single handed.
When we turned them on they all ran perfectly thanks to the comprehensive prep I started two weeks in advance. This type of thorough preparation always pays big dividends in terms of reliability I have found.

The feedback overall has been very positive and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to have been involved in this wonderful new event. May it long continue. Thanks again to all who contributed including our new stage hand Anthony. (Thats the wee fulla hiding behind the subs.)

It was a wonderful event until we got rained out with Million Dollars playing late on Sunday afternoon to a very damp audience.

Many thanks to Kathy Cuningham for taking a chance on me and believing I could pull this one off.