ONEMANA — DAY THREE
TODAY WE VISIT THE HOP’S SPIRITUAL HOME — ONEMANA!
For as long as most regular Beach Hop attendees will remember, Friday has been the big one, seeing a gigantic convoy travel to the small seaside settlement of Onemana. The picturesque and quiet town on the edge of the Coromandel Peninsula fills up over the summer holiday season, but even that seasonal influx has nothing on the Hop. The day begins at the Whangamata Esplanade, with cars beginning to assemble en masse from 8am in preparation for the cruise out at 11am. This isn’t just a method of ensuring that the Castrol Edge Thunder Cruise lives up to its name but a logistical necessity. Why’s that? Well, due to Onemana’s popularity as a destination, the mass assembly in Whangamata is where all participating vehicles get allocated a windscreen sticker permitting entry to the Onemana beachfront upper reserve. No sticker, no entry — the perfect solution to queuejumping opportunism! The road to Onemana isn’t a long one, and, this year, it seemed that nearly every roadside verge or parking bay was occupied by spectators in foldout chairs anticipating a morning filled with noise and the smell of burnt petrol. They won’t have been disappointed, with a smooth-running
cruise giving them several hundred awesome automobiles to admire. With those same several hundred vehicles vying for a position in one of the Onemana reserves, the scenes in the small town of Onemana were of controlled chaos. A plan was in place, with plenty of Beach Hop volunteers to keep everything running like clockwork, but we sure didn’t envy them their job of arranging those sheer numbers of vehicles into their allocated paddocks. As they do every year, though, the crew filtered through each and every entrant, and the end result was precisely why the Onemana cruise is as popular as it is. Both the upper and lower reserves filled with the cars of the Hop certainly is a sight to behold, especially when set against the Pacific stretching out towards the horizon. The thing that makes Beach Hop a truly one-ofa-kind event is the attention given to all aspects of the show not just the cars in attendance. For those wanting a little more than the cars that filled the reserves and side streets, the Castrol team, which were sponsoring the day, had Karl Boniface and his crew on hand to fire up the ‘Nitro Flashback’ nostalgia funny car. These guys are real professionals and took time to ensure that earplugs were handed out to all spectators who might have needed them before rattling ribcages within the immediate vicinity.
The Castrol guys also had a few competitions going at their tent, including a strength competition and a drag racing reaction-time simulator. In a somewhat less mechanical manner, music was taken care of by the Recliner Rockers performing in the lower reserve, and Tim and the Rockets holding court in the upper reserve, both bands providing a funky and laidback way to enjoy the setting. A sudden downpour in the afternoon triggered a mass exodus back to Whangamata, but it was short-lived and granted an empty and serene Onemana beach to those who had braved the rain. There are no losers at Onemana, though, and we are quite sure that nobody left feeling ripped off — just putting this magazine together, we’re ready to do it all over again!