The bodies in the lake
The alpine lakes of the South Island are among our most popular natural attractions. But their pictureperfect qualities above the water belie a dark secret beneath. Michael Wright reports.
Even now, no-one is quite sure what happened to Michael Mulcare. He was last seen sitting on the veranda of the youth hostel at Lake Tekapo about 3pm on May 9, 1975. He had been lamenting the state of the hostel’s canoe, which had leaks at both ends and which he could have fixed had he only brought the right gear with him.
An hour later he and the canoe were gone. Neither has been seen since.
More than 100 people drown in New Zealand every year. The ones who are never found mostly go missing at sea, lost to the marine depths. Mulcare is one of a small, macabre subset who disappear in our lakes, often close to shore, almost always in a known location, never to be recovered.
Police missing persons data is not kept in such detail, but Lake Tekapo, with seven, is thought to hold the most bodies. The latest such disappearance was on Lake Wakatipu, in Queenstown, last January, when American tourist Tyler Nii landed in the water on a tandem skydive jump. Divers searched for him for two weeks before giving up.
Most of those missing are in the alpine lakes of the South Island, which all share two characteristics: the water is cold and it is deep.
‘‘You need to find [people] alive, quickly,’’ Brent Swanson says, ‘‘As soon as you’ve drowned, you tend to go straight to the bottom.’’
Until 18 months ago, Swanson was the ranking police officer at Lake Tekapo, where he led numerous search and rescue efforts, including one for a group of 11 kayakers who got into trouble near Motuariki Island in 2015. Two of the party died, although both their bodies were found.
‘‘We were lucky that day . . . they could have all perished,’’ Swanson says. ‘‘We recovered the people and we didn’t have to have that conversation.’’
‘‘That conversation’’ is explaining to the families of the missing that their loved one is in water too deep to search and so cold that they will never rise to the surface, meaning they will likely remain in the lake forever.
Most recently, Swanson had to do this in 2009, when three men, Alexander Haywood, his son, Antony Haywood, and Murray Green, drowned after their boat hit an object in Lake Tekapo. The elder Haywood was the only one found, and only then because he was wearing a back brace that kept him afloat.
Ask a local in Tekapo and they will tell you the lake holds on to its dead.
That it has earned this reputation ahead of other, similar, lakes is perhaps due to the fact it is popular with boaties and prone to quick changes in conditions: more chance for more people to get into trouble more often.
The worst incident was in January 1965 when a party of five – Mackenzie farmer Tom Howes, his 17-year-old nephew Paul Ford, his 15-year-old niece Judith, and family friends, the primary school-aged Arnst sisters – were in an aluminium dinghy caught by a rogue wave. Judith, a strong swimmer, clung to the hull all night, and made it to the lake’s northern shore. The rest were never found.
Hydrologist Ian Halstead says the temperature in the thermocline – the top metre or so of a lake – can reach 17 or 18 degrees Celsius in late summer. Below that, though, the water is steady at between 7C and 9C all the way down.
Tekapo is nowhere near New Zealand’s deepest lakes, which plumb depths of more than 400 metres, but an average of 100-110m and a deepest point of 120m is more than enough to thwart police or navy divers.
‘‘It’s a big lake,’’ Halstead says. ‘‘It’s too deep for any diving activities to be able to recover bodies. They will decompose of course, but because it’s so bloody cold the natural process of gases building up in the body doesn’t occur.’’