A Postcard from Pauanui

Body surfing is a skill that Kiwis learn at an early age. You need a surf beach, of which there are thousands spread around the coastline of New Zealand. Then you wade out to about waist deep and watch the incoming waves like Keanu Reeves in Point Break.

When you spot a “good one”, you turn and face the beach and move to where you think the wave will break. Then you dive headfirst into the water and assume the body shape of an eel. If you time it right, the wave will carry you the whole way to the shoreline and gracefully deposit you on the sand. If you time it badly, the wave will either smack you on the head like you are an errant school child, or it will pick you up like an old sheet in a tumble dryer and smack you un-ceremonially on the sea floor. In between these two events, you will summersault with the grace of a drunken hippo. But luckily this all happens within the wave and nobody will see it.

The additional problem with this manoeuvre is that you end some distance from the shore. You’ll, first of all, get sucked out to sea by the undertow of the wave that just humiliated you. As you struggle to your feet, the next wave, which is invariably bigger and stronger than the one before, will smash into you with the ferocity of an All Black who has just been mocked for knocking the ball on.

I took up body surfing at the age of 43, much too late in life if I was ever going to achieve Olympic level standards. In truth, I’ve only practised once or twice a year since. I’m less a novice and more an occasional dabbler. As a result, my timing is terrible and I end up losing my dignity and quite often my shorts on a regular basis.  

Occasionally, I catch a sweet one and the rush of adrenaline as you glide through the water is magnificent. In the same way that a weekend golfer will sometimes catch a drive nicely and convince himself that he is Tiger Woods, when I’m successful in the water, I like to think I’ve finally mastered it. The truth is that the sea likes playing with you. I’ve never managed more than one nice run in all my visits to the beach. Maybe, I should learn from this and step out of the sea and grab my towel whenever I’ve managed to time a wave right. But I never do.

I’ve managed to practice a lot this summer. In the absence of foreign travel, we are keen to see as much of New Zealand this holiday season as we did last year. We started with a week in Pauanui. That’s a sandy spit on the west coast of the Coromandel peninsula, dotted with multi-million-dollar beach properties. It’s the favourite retirement destination for Waikato dairy farmers, who made their fortune servicing the Chinese demand for milk powder. 

Everyone owns a fishing boat with a powerful outboard motor and they pull these down to the wharf each morning using the 1950’s Massey Ferguson tractor that they rescued from the farm when they retired. They have seamlessly replaced milking Friesians with coaxing Snapper out of the sea.

My father-in-law is one of these retired farmers and kindly opens his door to us each Christmas. We stayed for a week this time. Enjoying the beach and the slow bicycle race pace of life.

It is a town of roughly 1,000 souls. At Christmas that swells to about 20,000 as the kids and grandkids of the retired residents descend on the place, tempted by the allure of free accommodation and their parents home cooking.

As a result, at this time of year, it’s difficult to get to the Supermarket or to the small number of cafes in the town centre. Covid passport rules added to the complexity. Those of us who live in Auckland have just come out of four months of lockdown when we couldn’t leave the city. This was relaxed just before Christmas and it feels as though the whole city has decamped to the beach.

Thankfully, most of the kids headed home after New Year and the village went back to its traditional pace of life. I say traditional, but in fact, this place hardly existed 50 years ago. It was a sandy spit of land at the end of a long dirt road. A visionary developer with an eye for a quick buck saw the potential.

The spit had a surf beach on one side facing the Pacific Ocean. On the other, it had a calm harbour beach, safe for kids and rubbish swimmers like me.

He started building in an unconventional style. There were to be no fences and sociability was encouraged. He also built a grass runway to attract the burgeoning rich from Auckland who wanted to splash out their wealth on light aircraft.

Many of the original residents have passed away now and the houses have been passed on to their kids and grandkids. This has made the place livelier but has also increased the number of fences. It seems that our generation is not as sociable as the last.

It’s a town that will always be special to me as it’s the place I got married in ten years ago. It has everything you need with one exception. For some reason, there are no pubs in town. There are cafes you can get a drink in, but no traditional drinking establishment. Maybe I should open one.  I think you could make a good living running a pub there. There are still a lot of retirees living there and from what I can see, they all like a tipple.

But until then, I’ll have to find my thrills in the ocean. Watching the sun rise from the Pacific, and catching that big one that serenades you back to the beach.