This article was first published in the Tararua Tramper Volume 86, no 9, October 2013
Beach clean-up Pukerua Bay – Plimmerton All grades
August 20, 2014
Last year David Ogilvie organised a clean-up of the Makara coast as part of the regular Wednesday trip schedule and suggested we do another this year. I approached the Porirua City Council, which requested we do the Pukerua – Hongoeka coastline as it is a difficult job for community groups because of the distance and terrain.
Indeed it was hard work for the 40 – 50 TTC members and locals who turned up to work in rather difficult conditions, with a strong southerly and occasional showers.
The BBB and E groups concentrated on the beach and environs around our starting point at the end of Ocean Parade at Pukerua Bay. While the amount of rubbish was light in places, it took effort to extract from under bushes and out of seaweed tangles. There was also a very big stash of bottles and household rubbish, which they managed to lug to a nearby council bin. Congratulations to Syd Edwards for winning the ‘yellow ribbon’ prize.
Diane Head led EM trampers further around the coast, where rubbish had lain for years, tangled in coastal shrubbery, and they found the remains of a boat along with an enormous number of bottles and other plastic. There was no proper shelter from the weather for lunch, but Diane reported that the group enjoyed their day.
After a tramp around the coast of an hour or so, the M and MF groups started their picking up. By then it was very windy indeed with lashings of rain, which made it difficult to manage, trying to balance on piles of slippery driftwood with a bag of rubbish in each hand and lugging other items too big to go in bags as well. We were very glad when we got to the beginning of the quarry road, where we’d arranged to leave our first pile of bags for the council to collect. By then it was bitterly cold. Several people then filled a third bag on the last 2 km stretch to Hongoeka Bay.
Despite the difficult conditions, there were the usual “fun” finds. Lynne White took home some pumice, a float on a rope and fisherman’s lure for her delighted granddaughter.
It was a fantastic day’s work by those involved and great publicity for our club: we got a write-up in the Kapi-Mana News and attracted an appreciative letter to the editor from a local. It was a shame that there was so much rubbish that we were unable to collect it all so that stretch could do with another going over sometime in the future