Bikers in Blue charity run

Blue September is the Prostate Cancer Foundation fund-raising month in NZ.  There are all sorts of events to raise money for this worthy cause and the Fat Bikers Motorcycle Club organised charity rides in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.  IAM members were asked to go along and show the flag and it didn't take much prompting!

Unfortunately, the weather didn't co-operate in the early morning with torrential rain (it's been a very wet winter in the north island of NZ) and the 2 1/2 hour ride from Coromandel to Auckland to get to the start of the ride was awful, with a lot of standing water about.  To make matters worse, the zip zipper-up thingy on my overjacket exploded en route without me being aware until a rivulet of icy water ran down my chest.  Never mind, good excuse to visit an accessory shop in the next few days!

The Triple all decked out in blue tinsel

Fortunately, the rain stopped shortly after arriving and the roads dried out pretty quickly for the run itself which was great.

All manner of sports bikes and cruisers came along and the next photo of a Suzuki Gladius with a life-sized dummy on the back is especially for Brandy.  It might give her ideas for punishing Brad if he's blotted his copybook ;-).

A seating position to make your eyes water!

There were some nicely finished bikes there and the Suzuki M109 clearly had a lot of money spent on it.

Beautiful M109 with blue helmet hair!

Didja notice the nitrous bottle in the previous photo?

Another M109 from the front!

An awful lot of Can-Ams

Mark (Fat Max) Hill, the FBMC front man; gave a hilarious ride briefing where he had everyone in stitches.  At the end of the ride, there were heaps of donated raffle prizes with Mark again as the MC.  We all know that events like this take a huge amount of organising but Mark and his team made it all look easy.  The hallmark of very slick work.  A big well done guys! 

 Love the tee shirt Mark!

To end on an appropriate note, Mark talked for a bit about prostate cancer and what I didn't realise is that 1 in 10 men will suffer from it at some time in their life.  That's a pretty high percentage and I'll be ringing the doc to get a test in the next few days.  Thanks Mark, you're a gem - I'll even buy you a pie from the Coromandel Pie Company if you get up this way!