Hardy campers not put off by rain
A family’s stay in Marahau was a wash out after torrential rain flooded their tent, but it hasn’t put them off their camping holiday.
Campground managers around the region say the wet weather hasn’t affected bookings with the warm temperatures seeing campers stick around.
However, with more wet weather forecast they are waiting to see how the rest of the season shapes up.
Sonya and James Ramsay, of Oamaru, and their three children Neve, 11, Fern, 7, and Art, 5, were staying at Marahau Beach Motorcamp on Friday when the weather turned for the worse.
‘‘When we went to bed on the Friday night it started to rain and there was forecast for more, and by 11pm it was already really heavy and the rain radar showed there was more coming,’’ James said.
‘‘By 2am the water started coming in, by 3:30am it was ankle deep.’’
The water came in through the front ‘‘door’’ and up through some holes in the bottom of the tent, but it didn’t leak anywhere else.
‘‘It did bloody well, it’s a 50-year-old tent,’’ Sonya said.
The Ramsays decided to bail when their suitcases and other things in the tent started to get wet.
‘‘It wasn’t much fun,’’ James said.
‘‘[The kids] thought it was exciting because they got to go to McDonalds for breakfast.’’
With their tent and belongings dried out, they were looking forward to spending another couple of days at Tahunanui.
Campground manager Marcel Fekkes said the season had been ‘‘very busy’’ so far, with the park fully booked over the Christmas and New Year period.
‘‘We had a huge influx of people arriving on the 27th, 28th and 29th, which filled us up totally. We were creating more sites by using the staff car parks.’’
Now the main holiday period was over they were back down to 800 people staying on the grounds, which was similar to last year.
‘‘The rain is always unfortunate, we’ve had a bit of a funny season really, we’ve had summer arrive really early, and then the first rain started in the new year.
‘‘Because of the high temperatures people weren’t bothered too much, last year we had a far colder summer with more wind and it was colder so people tended to leave a bit sooner.’’
Fekkes said none of the camp visitors had left early because of the rain in the past several days.
‘‘We’ve had lots of people with tents this year, the die-hards.
‘‘This extended period of rain now is not going to do us any favours though, I mean after this week it’s looking particularly poor, but we’ll wait and see.’’
Pohara Beach Top 10 Holiday Park owner Brent Clarke said it had 500 people staying on Christmas Day, double the amount compared to last year.
He said they had been fully booked over the Christmas and New Year period, but were down to 75 per cent capacity at the moment, which was ‘‘no different to any other year’’.
Clarke said the summer weather had been different to last year, starting with hot weather early and becoming more ‘‘patchy’’ than usual towards the middle of January.
He said they got 140mm of rain in four hours on Saturday morning, with 70mm of that coming down in two hours.
‘‘The campers we have are really hardy people, we only had water in two tents and they dried them out and were back in them for the next few days.’’
Clarke said Pohara had a microclimate and the weather forecast for the region often didn’t turn out to be right.
They potentially missed out on people wanting to camp at their site because of a bad weather forecast which wouldn’t eventuate.
Top 10 Motueka Holiday Park manager Ashlee Ilton said they only had one ‘‘big downpour’’ on Saturday, with otherwise mostly fine weather and the odd shower here and there.
They had been fully booked over Christmas and New Year, which was the case every year.
‘‘We had the odd bit of rain here in Motueka, nothing that has affected our campers.
‘‘Some campers chose to shorten their stay due to the rain we got on Saturday, other campers chose to stick it out and the rain only lasted half a day and the sun has been out ever since.’’
The long range forecast for Nelson shows a combination of rain, cloud and sun until the end of January, with temperatures in the low to mid 20s.