The Summer Ahead

As of December 12, a small piece of Tolaga Bay is ours and with the summer ahead we need to make plans so we hit the road again for the drive to the East Cape and a weekend to get to know our new neck of the woods.

Tolaga Bay has a delightful beachfront campsite with a good range of cabins, caravans and tent sites and it makes a very comfortable base until we can establish Major Sprite as our on site accommodation along with other necessities such as water.

​When the original pine forest was harvested in 2014, the contractors formed a driveway onto the property but with no gates and the property appearing to be virtually abandoned it has become something of a wasteland with a number of dead animals being dumped along with other rubbish. Combined with a derelict road fence that provides easy access for wandering stock, clearly a fencing programme is an early priority.

Just a small section of the logging debris that needs to be cleared.

​To establish our home away from home we first needed to select a site so after much wandering and looking and comparing we settled on a raised area that looks south across the cultivated Uawa River flats to the dry hills near the coast. This is close to the stream channel but showed no sign of being flooded, it keeps the sun until late in the afternoon and is close to the last remaining stand of Pukatea and Kahikatea trees that once would have densely forested the moist river flats.

We need to build a roof to provide shelter for our caravan and to collect our water so obviously our tanks also need to be here but with no electricity our water system needs to be powered by gravity alone. We will add solar power and solar water heating at a later date. However, along with shelter and water the other pressing necessity is a suitable facility for the inevitable daily ablutions so we need to research and build a working composting toilet, a task for which failure is not an option.

Our overpowering sense is that we now own a piece of land that is distressed. With piles of logging debris, a choked stream channel, slumping logging tracks and the native forest fighting against wilding pines we have decided to name our new property Tane's Rest to signal a change of direction, a new dawn and the beginning of a journey away from exploitation towards sustainability.