20 YEARS OF GOOD TIMES

WITH REPCO BEACH HOP 20 POSTPONED UNTIL LATER THIS YEAR — SOMETHING THAT WOULD HAVE SEEMED ABSOLUTELY LUDICROUS JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO — WE LOOK BACK THROUGH TWO DECADES OF THE BEST EVENT NEW ZEALAND HAS EVER SEEN

‘ You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’ — the old adage has never rung more true than it has over the past couple of months here in New Zealand. We’ve quickly had to face the reality that everything that we take for granted in our day-to-day lives — the complete freedom, the assumed stability of the status quo, and the access to anything we could ever want (providing we’ve got the money, of course) — just isn’t guaranteed. We’ve become too complacent and unappreciative of all we have in this incredibly beautiful, safe, and inclusive country, and, for Kiwis like us, the postponement of Repco Beach Hop 20 and the accompanying fallout has made all that painfully obvious.

A few months ago, the idea of Beach Hop not taking place would have seemed ludicrous — beyond comprehension. Even as rumours of event cancellations began to surface in early March, such a course of action still seemed like an impossibility for our beloved week away from it all in the Coromandel. For 20 years, the Hop has been a beacon of escapism for the average

Kiwi enthusiast. It has been a timely dose of detachment from reality that punctuates our year, giving us a week of unbridled car fanaticism, an excuse to see mates that we just don’t talk to enough, and a goal post to aim for when working on our project cars.

This year is the 20th anniversary of Beach Hop, and while we’ll have to wait until November to enjoy it properly, we thought we’d take the opportunity to look back over the past two decades to see where this absolute monster of a festival began, how it evolved into what it now is, and perhaps even where it’s heading in the future.

“It was never my idea in the first place,” says Noddy Watts, Beach Hop’s long-serving (-suffering?) president. “The local rock ’n’ roll club, Coastal Rockers, held a birthday hop dance for one night every year in April, and in 2001 some local businesses decided to put on some entertainment in the town during the day to give the attendees something to do before the dance started. As I’m a hot rodder, they invited me to join the committee and bring some cars to the festival.”

At that point, Beach Hop was called the ‘Whangamata Rock ’n’ Roll Festival’. That first year, Noddy helped to corral 100 bikes and 100 cars into taking part in the one-day event held on 28 April. Two blocks of the main street were closed and three bands played to the 4500 people who showed up to the newly improved event. Clearly, adding vehicles to the mix was a very, very good idea.

“It went really well and everyone was happy,” says Noddy. “At the debrief after the event, I stood up and said the name was boring and presented them with the ‘Beach Hop’ logo. It was as simple as a ‘hop’ — a dance — at the beach … Beach Hop. We adopted it and trademarked the name for the next event.”

Only two people who were present at that meeting are still involved today — Noddy and Marie Bunyan. While the other originals have taken a back seat as things changed dramatically, these two stalwarts have been at the helm and watched as the festival exploded in every direction imaginable. The next few years would see the numbers exponentially

ONLY TWO PEOPLE WHO WERE PRESENT AT THAT MEETING ARE STILL INVOLVED TODAY

increase — 300 cars in 2002, 600 cars in 2003, and from there it only grew.

Initially, sourcing funding and sponsorship was tough. As they say, though, ‘If you build it, they will come’, and soon enough, a long list of big-name sponsors — Repco, Meguiar’s, Castrol, Sony, Makita, Ford, and many more — would recognize the value of the Hop and begin to support it in a meaningful way. By the mid noughties it was clear that the financial side was making sense, but, as with all success stories, a day of reckoning would come in which it would sink or swim. For Beach Hop, that came in 2005. The event had already reached record numbers when a radio station sent out a mass text to let all its listeners know just how hard Whangamata was going off. “We got absolutely invaded that Saturday night,” says Noddy. “It wasn’t exactly a riot; it was just one hell of a mess to clean up the next morning. I was prepared to walk away from the festival at that point.”

That was to be Beach Hop’s watershed moment.

Now that the word was out to circles wider than the hot rod and rock ’n’ roll community, any event moving forward was going to need some serious assistance from some people with big sticks, of both the metaphorical and the physical varieties. Salvation would come from the Police area commander, Ross Ardern, who told Noddy that Beach Hop was just too good of an event to lose. The cops would be able to save the festival with a liquor ban and a more intense policing strategy. Though it wasn’t a popular move with some when first introduced in 2006, the reality is that if a more heavy-handed approach hadn’t been taken there was no way the Hop could have continued. As an interesting side note, you might be wondering if, with a surname like that, Commander Ardern has a little more political pull than most these days — and you’d be right, he’s Jacinda’s dear old dad! That same year, 2006, also saw the first appearance of an international band:

New South Wales group The Retro Rockets. International visitors would become a normal part of Beach Hop’s identity, but at the time it was one of many steps up that pointed towards a very bright future.

It was also during this era that NZV8 made an appearance in Whangamata — in fact, our very first issue was launched at the Hop back in 2005, and Issue No. 2 saw a full spread of coverage. We’ve made the pilgrimage every year since — there are few better times and places to sniff out the country’s freshest batch of amazing builds and interesting people.

One of Beach Hop’s key facets has always been its giveaway cars. Now, we’re not at all saying that’s the only reason people show up, but it certainly hasn’t hurt! The first was a 1927 T Roadster in 2002, built with help from the local school kids. From there it only got better, with 38 major prizes having being given away so far, and four more absolute crackers — a ’65 Mustang drop-top, a ’23 Ford T-bucket, a 2020 Harley-Davidson Street Bob, and $10K straight cash — to be handed out in November.

“It’s an odd thing,” says Noddy. “The giveaway cars become part of your life for a while when you build them, and then suddenly you have to give them away, and they’re gone. If I could only pick one to keep for myself, though, despite being a hot rodder, I’d have to take the blue ’50 Mercury we gave away in 2015. It wasn’t fast, but it was beautiful.”

That same year also saw entry numbers restricted for the first time. A round-table discussion had taken place at the conclusion of the 2014

event and the consensus was that bigger isn’t always better.

“We’d done the huge-numbers thing,” says Noddy. “We were simply running out of room. Trying to find space at all the meets and on the cruises was becoming a real headache, and the parades were taking so long that too many cars were overheating by the time they actually got anywhere. It was time to bring it back down to numbers we knew we could manage — 1000 entries.”

This, of course, meant that some people would miss out, but a hard line had been drawn in that beautiful golden Coromandel sand, and it’s now very much become a case of ‘you snooze, you lose’. A limit on official entries, of course, doesn’t stop half the country from showing up for the party each year — usually around 40,000 or so — and while their cars can’t take part in the official events as such, this massive influx of people and machinery helps to make the Hop the magical and transformative event that it is. Packing out the streets; bringing all manner of interesting vehicles; and, of course, dumping millions of much-needed dollars into the local economy. Interestingly, despite the potential pitfalls that come along with the inundation of tens of thousands of people onto a sleepy seaside town for five days of cars, music, and partying, the local government has always been nothing other than massively supportive. Current mayor of Thames-Coromandel, Sandra Goudie, has been a cheerleader for the Hop from the very start. “From its inception, I’ve always been a fan of Beach Hop — Noddy graciously allowed my 1972 Ford Falcon V8 to enter [in 2001]. It overheated in the parade, so I became an avid spectator from

there on. I’m incredibly proud of the Whangamata community [in] attaining iconic national and international status for this event. They keep pulling the magic out of the hat year on year.”

As you can imagine, the decision to postpone the Hop this year was not made lightly. While the team could have avoided all those agonizing hours that went into making the tough calls if they had a crystal ball to tell them just how serious things would get for the entire country, and that the decision would have been made for them anyway, there’s no denying the impact this has had on the Whangamata community. “The cancelling of this event was a heart-rending decision for Noddy and his team,” laments Sandra. “We all felt the impact deeply — it isn’t just about the money; we all seem to have an abiding love for the event, the cars, the people, and the music.” “Honestly? It could have been a lot worse,” Noddy says. “Potentially this could have killed Beach Hop for good, but we haven’t had to cancel the event altogether, and the November dates [25–29th] look really good. I think by that point we’ll be out of Level 2 and people are going to want to celebrate surviving the whole thing — I think we’ll all be just wanting to get out there and feel like part of a community again, and to support the locals.” We think Noddy is spot on with his predictions. If anything, after the initial shock had worn off, the postponement has only galvanized people’s love of the Hop. We’ve now been given a few more months to get back into the shed and get our cars done, to get a solid crew together, and the perfect pad rebooked. The anticipation for the return to normalcy that only Beach Hop can provide is palpable — it’s going to be one hell of a party.

Over the years, Beach Hop has given away so many vehicles, it would be easy to lose count. Here are most of them.