UNDER ATTACK
You’ve just driven over the hill, seen the corduroy lines of swell, your heart pumps. As you pull into the carpark, your seat reclined as you reach for your wetsuit in the back seat. Somehow you manage to park the car while whipping off ya gears and sliding one leg into the wetsuit before jumping out pulling on the other leg then the zip up and sprinting down the beach. The car didn’t even get locked but that doesn’t matter, the waves are pumping! You dive into the refreshing pristine water and admire each wave as it rolls in on your paddle out. By the time you reach the takeoff your levels of anxiety are ready to blow. You stroke into the first available wave, the sun glistens off the water as the nose of your board slices through as if parting the ocean, the drop is intense, but weeks of dreaming of this moment have prepared you. The wave jacks up down the line and you know what is about to happen, time stands still and the euphoric moment of moments amongst surfers begins to happen. You are deep inside one of the truest forms of nature, a participant in its daily act. The green room, baz, the womb. Whatever you want to call it. You are ejected from within to the channel, where you lay on your board buzzing! Everything seems different now, you start to see the world. You notice the birds nesting on the cliff above bringing fresh food to their chicks, that seal barking from the rocks, you look down and admire the crystal clear water with the seaweed swirly and think damn if there wasn’t so much swell you could get a paua or two for lunch. The other surfers out get barrelled as you did, and you hoot. Nothing else matters right now but this moment, there is no tomorrow. Then all of a sudden, you are woken from your trance by a Maui’s dolphin smacking you around the ears with a 100 page rolled up NZ SURF MAG. You are in complete shock to find out that we are under attack, this session that you have just experienced, that surfers for half a century have experienced similar to, could all be coming to an end, the feeling of no tomorrow could become a reality and sessions such as these will have no tomorrow. Right now more than ever our coastline and surfbreaks are under attack by an enemy called progress. Sure the world needs jobs to survive but if those jobs take the world we know away from us, is that really worth it? Will all the money in the world mean anything if you can’t swim at your local beach, dip a toe in a river, or partake in any of our cultural or recreational pastimes? Only each individual can answer that for themselves. From the top to the bottom of our blessed islands, communities are fighting to save their way of life. As Kiwis we were brought up to worry about a bit of rubbish that blew down the beach, now we are facing changes to the forms of our coastline, changes that can never be reversed. The dredging of the Whangamata Estuary to make way for more leisure boat traffic has been at the forefront of the protection movement, yet facing a similar fate in Dunedin, surfers are putting up a brave fight to save the legendary Aramoana Spit, one of the best sand bottom barrels in the country, from dredging in the Otago Harbour so bigger ships can utilise the port. In the North Island approval has been granted to further dredge the Tauranga Harbour entrance and remove a further 15 million cubic metres of sand so shipping contracts can increase in frequency and size. This sand is the very sediment that makes the legendary peaks of Matakana Island, and while local Iwi opposed the shipping lane expansion, there was no such fight from local surfers. Further south of here the isolated East Cape region has faced exploratory offshore drilling, of the same type which saw the world’s largest oil spill occur in the Gulf of Mexico and while it was recently announced that the company in question has pulled out, will this completely disappear. We saw first hand the devastation that can occur from an oil spill when the Rena was torn in two pieces outside of the Bay of Plenty. Over on the West Coast iron sand mining is in full swing, with prospecting or exploration permits already granted to mine sand from Whanganui to the
Pandora Banks near Cape Reinga, out to the 12 mile zone. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that many of our world class surf breaks at Taranaki, Raglan, Port Waikato, Piha, Shipwreck Bay, and many in between are all dependent on sand build up, and with these companies looking to take what they claim is a four billion tonne resource, then where will these sand replenishments come from? That’s right, they won’t! And that’s only to selfishly look at our own pastimes zone, think about the disturbance and destruction of the marine life in these areas. Back on land it is now several hundred years since the colonisation of New Zealand and yet we seem to be going backwards when it comes to ridding our sewerage, and now when you visit areas such as Raglan, Whangamata, and New Plymouth there are signs up warning of shellfish collection and swimming in sewerage outfall zones, and the councils simply state that they are going through upgrades. So, that is what we have come to accept, when something needs an upgrade it’s ok to literally shit on our environment. If only for a little while, cause it’s to costly to take the other options. Crazy times! We as surfers, alongside fishermen, are the biggest users of our environment, so if your region and community is facing issues, then don’t flog it off thinking there is nothing you can do, or that you don’t have time to involve yourself as the surf is pumping. A session like that described above is what we live for. If that is taken away forever, then there will be plenty of spare time later wondering how you could have helped, when your surfbreak doesn’t exist or the water has made you soo sick you lay in bed for two weeks.
Today is tomorrow, act now!
Yours in surfing
Cory Scott and the Team at New Zealand Surfing Magazine.