CHECKLIST

Down at the wharf at Tryphena, rod in hand, holding court in his “director’s chair”, Bob Whitmore isn’t expecting much. Not like in the old days. His first day here on the Barrier was sometime in the mid-50s, flown in by legendary pioneer aviator

Fred Ladd. He went straight out in the boat. Caught 50-something snapper, 14 to 15 pounds a fish, almost too easy to make it fun, and certainly too many to know what to do with. He gave away as much as he could and ploughed the rest into the garden.

Bob’s been on the island 42 years now — or at least that’s where you’d find his house. Because a lot of that time he was out at sea, decades spent on his longliner on the waters around the Gulf. It was a gilded age, at least until the big trawlers came and vacuumed up everything. They’d slip in at night, park up off the wharf like it was Friday night shopping downtown. It was crazy, it was carnage. Eventually it was stopped, after it became clear exactly how bad an idea it was. Now the fish are slowly coming back, but it’s not the same and Bob doubts it ever will be again.

But back when he first came out here, back when there were 250 people on the island, he loved it.

“It was the isolation and the fishing, everything. It was such a free and easy place; it was beautiful. Paradise. No power, cars falling to bits, wild cattle, heaps of shooting and fishing. You could pitch your tent anywhere on the side of the road and no one cared. Build your bach and no one gave a damn.”

Back then you knew you were safe on the road when you meandered home leaving the island’s cop drinking in the golf club behind you. The new cop doesn’t drink and tickets the islanders for expired WoFs.

After spending every spare moment camping on the island on weekends and holidays, Bob built his first bach here in 1968. He and wife Tipi stayed a couple of golden summers and in 1970 moved over for good.

Out on the Barrier, a calm bay is much valued. “There’s not one little place with an anchorage and shelter where I haven’t slept. I’d usually go where I could get TV coverage, because when you work hard all day, sometimes knocking off at nine o’clock at night, it’s nice to lie down and watch the box for an hour. Wreck Bay . . . Harataonga . . . Shark Alley at Medlands was all right. Little Barrier’s a prick of a place because it’s round and you can’t get a decent sleep there. Cuvier’s the same.”

Bob — yes, a man of the sea. But if marooned on land any December he’d be the go-to Santa for the community. The sack would be full of pa¯ ua and crays. Twinkling eyes. Beard in the style of generations, centuries of seamen. Wring him and you’d get pure salt.

The pull of the sea never leaves. “I like listening to the waves crashing on the beach. All my life I’ve lived close to the water, even in O¯ tahuhu, I lived close to the river. Whitecaps one day, next day it’s calm. I never get sick of it, never.”

Once bound to the Barrier, Bob bought his longliner — a 24-footer, a two-man operation that laid up to 2000 hooks on a line between buoys marked by flags, then returned a little later to see what they’d got. In the winter they’d only get a quarter of a pound of fish per hook, but in summer it was two pounds average; a thousand-hook line yielding 2000 pounds of product.

“For 30 years, I’d go to sea Sunday morning and come home Friday night. Most of the time I was here, but when

● to the shop together. My mates are there, we sit down and read the paper and have our coffee and do the crossword and then wander home at midday. There’s Phil, there’s Bluey, there’s always someone down there.”

He lives for these moments. There’s no one at home now — his wife Tipi’s been gone two years, after 34 together. “It was a bugger. But she was pretty crook for a while. I go for a sleep in me chair by the TV sometimes and I wake up and feel as if she’s beside me.”

His best friend, Hank Hollick, is nine years dead. The stories are legion, the two a latter-day Butch and Sundance, riding across a New Zealand of few real rules that’s now long gone.

Hank — Mad Hank — owned a Tiger Moth, a wire and canvas open cockpit biplane new in the 1930s.

“I was at the pub one time having a few and I said to these jokers, ‘I love going to the bloody Barrier, but it costs so much bloody money and it’s so hard to get there’. And they said, ‘See that fella down the bar in the white overalls and that? He’s got an aeroplane. Go down and have a yarn with him.’ And so I do and that was when I met bloody Hank!”

Hollick was a strapping man, an infantryman in the Western Desert aged 19, a wrestler, parachutist and then a flying chimney sweep, buzzing the country and landing by farmhouses to offer his services. He also liked a drink and after a couple would address all-comers as “Scungy”. He was 13 years older than Bob, but they became fast friends and took off to the Barrier whenever they could.

They were best friends — mates for life. But in 2001, Bob got Guillain-Barre syndrome and was hospitalised for five months. “The bugger used to ring me up. Every second day, he’d ring. And here’s the thing: I didn’t know that he was dying at the time.”

Hank had cancer. “Bugger never told me. Never bloody told me, and there he is worrying about me. Should’ve been worrying about himself.”

Bob shakes his head. He’s tired: all this talk about the old days is making him wistful, or at least it might if he had time for “introspective crap”.

Sure, he says, he’s been here an age, but his story has chapters still unwritten. He’s only about the fifth oldest on the island by his reckoning and intends to take the crown one day.

Bob’s family has a plot in Otahuhu. ¯ There are no Whitmores buried on the Barrier, but he thinks he’ll stay on island. “No one would come to your grave in O¯ tahuhu and put flowers on it, may as well stay here.”

Hank’s buried at Gooseberry Flat. “He’s got a nice bloody tomb there with a parachute on it and things and an aeroplane. I went over to the council to see if I could book a plot. ‘Where did you want to go?’ they said. And I said, ‘By Hank’.”