About 2 hours after high tide, with an open sea swell of 5 metres, and westerly gales so strong they just about knocked me off my feet while I took this photo: the Waikawa Beach estuary, full. And yes, events like this are eroding the dunes quite rapidly.

The pre-dawn sky is delightful. Look east to see Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn. On the 24th the Moon will join in. Check Stellarium Web Online Star Map for IDs. Screenshot below from 24 April 2022 at Waikawa Beach (with Māori names added).

I spent an age today making a Big List of Waikawa Beach Birds. Counting only live birds, not those washed up on the beach, there are over 50! 🐦

These Rock pigeons, although common everywhere, are actually not that easy to find at Waikawa Beach. 🐦 I first spotted them a few months ago, but it was only yesterday things came together for a quick photo of one. It flew away immediately. 😒

I was never really very fond of gulls, but I’m coming to quite like the ones at Waikawa Beach. Tarapunga, Red-billed gull. 🐦

Waikawa Beach at 9 am on a cool, clear, sunny, still morning. Paradise.

The public toilets at Waikawa Beach were built around 50 or 60 years ago. They’re now in a state of decay. Today builders started demolishing the men’s side. The women’s side will become two accessible unisex toilets, a family room and a store room. Here the roof comes off.

On 03 March 2022 we had turf laid at the rental property we own. It must be watered daily. That water comes from a roughly 9,000 litre rainwater tank that also feeds the toilet in the house. Otherwise the house uses a metered town water supply.

A week on and the underground tank under the front lawn ran dry! It’s been hot and dry, with not even a skerrick of rain to help refill the tank or water the grass.

The town supply is supposed to refill the tank when the level drops too low, but what we didn’t know was the refill is a trickle that carries about as much water as a badly leaking kitchen tap! The plumber we consulted advised it could take a few days before there was enough water to flush the toilet.

All of that information was painstakingly unearthed as it wasn’t available in the original house purchase documents (we knew the tank existed and that it supplied the toilet, but that was all).

Today our local water supply guy, Reggie, who lives at Waikawa Beach, came with 10,000 litres in his tanker and filled the tank for us. It took about 8,500 litres. I wonder if that’ll last more than a week?

I couldn’t even see how to access the tank under its concrete inspection cover. Reggie had me lever a claw hammer under one of two pins until the edge of the lid was high enough for him to get his fingers under it and lift it out. Thank goodness he knew how things like that work!

We are due for a little rain this week. I hope it’s enough to water the grass enough and also to top up the tank.

This turf is turning out to be very expensive, with the cost of laying it and then our daily trips to hand water the tiny area not covered by the two sprinklers on a timer, and now 9,000 litres of water delivered.

We live at Waikawa Beach. Travel to the two closest centres, Ōtaki and Levin, means using State Highway 1. There is no alternative.

That stretch of road is notorious: in 2021 the road was closed 5 times, 26 times there were delays, and 8 people died, from a total 37 crashes.

Thanks to the 36 people who joined in on my little Daylight Poll the other day.

It was fun to learn that my day length in Waikawa Beach, Aotearoa New Zealand was longest at 15 hours 24 minutes, while the shortest was @svenseebeck in Oulu Finland, at 6 hours 32 minutes.

Waikawa Beach For Sale: 58 Manga Pirau Street. 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 176 m2 floor, 985 m2 Land.

Quick poll of Micro.Bloggers, with my answers:

• where are you? (Waikawa Beach, Aotearoa New Zealand)
• date? 28 January 2022
• sunrise? 06:22
• sunset? 20:44
• day length? 15 hours 24 minutes

Last year I devised a community event called the Wow Waikawa! Photo Fest and asked a friend to help organise it. Today I submitted the final project report to the funders.

It’s very satisfying to have run this community event and to have received very positive feedback!

Jean: The photos were fantastic and was an awesome activity with the kids and dogs.

In a nutshell: we applied for and were granted funding, then ran a basic photo skills workshop, and invited submissions of photos that celebrated Waikawa Beach. A key factor was that this was not a competition about photographic skill or technique. It was a celebration, sharing what’s wonderful about this place.

To avoid privacy and permissions issues we specified photos were not to feature people or pets, though they could be in the background.

We received 120 photos and selected 32 for printing at various sizes as Walldots by a company called HappyMoose who gave us a generous discount for our event.

Anja: We found all of them. Good fun. We walked quite a few km’s and found a few places we hadn’t explored before. We found one thanks to Pokemon Go!!! Gosh, I didn’t even know we had a shower at the toilet block 🤷‍♀

Then we put the photos up all over Waikawa Beach, on fences, power boxes, the backs of signs (or even the front in one case), the wall of the toilet block, the back of a rubbish bin, the firefighting water tank, and even (in plastic bags and taped on) a couple of rocks by the river.

Aside: the photos on the rubbish bin and water tank looked fabulous then promptly fell off, thanks to the anti-graffiti paint the Council had used on them!

We also created clue sheets so those who chose to could search out the photos. We couldn’t give prizes but created a couple of PDF certificates we later mailed out to contributors and those who hunted for photos.

One feature was that some photos were in plain sight, so someone might happen to see them and feel a bit of a buzz at this unexpected pleasant thing. Other photos were a bit hidden, or in a couple of cases, well-hidden, so folks could enjoy hunting them out.

Aside: a random technician working on a power issue commented that the photo on the power box he was dealing with was great and that he really enjoyed seeing it. Perfect!

One friend, whose photo was selected, commented every time we all passed her photo, obviously really thrilled.

Now we’ve wrapped up, though some folks have opted to let their photos stay in situ. They certainly brighten up the power boxes!

Fiona: we had visitors and this was a great way to get everyone out walking and seeing all of Waikawa Beach area and not just the beach front.

I learned some things:

• this project took way more time and energy than I would have expected, had I really thought about it beforehand, but it was very rewarding.
• Charlie, my co-organiser, was invaluable in providing support, encouragement, process ideas and doing the work.
• it took a long time to put up 32 photos around Waikawa Beach. (2.5 hours to scout out locations, 2.5 hours to put the photos in place — and that was with two of us. Then another hour or so for me on my own to add labels with numbers.)
• Walldots aren’t designed for outdoor use but most of them stood up well to 3 weeks or more of sun, wind, rain.
• Anti-graffiti paint works really well. 😆
• I’ve sometimes visited photo exhibitions where photographers have put in immense amounts of skill, training, planning, time (sometimes months), post-processing to make a perfect shot. I look at those photos and they are ‘alienating’ in the sense that I think “I could never do that”. I’m truly a spectator. This exhibition had a sense of reality and immediacy because we weren’t looking for technical expertise but for a celebration of daily life. The photos were ‘flawed’ in many ways and for that reason made a real connection: “I could have taken that photo”. They were a reflection of what we were looking for: community and heart.

By sheer chance the usual summer activities at Waikawa Beach were all cancelled (Covid concerns). This event happened to nicely fill a gap.

It’s ~6 years since we moved to Waikawa Beach and yesterday we finally achieved the ‘right’ arrangement of furniture in the living area.

I took out all the small furniture to properly vacuum and mop the floors. Then we changed things round. So much better!

Waikawa Beach For Sale: 75 Strathnaver Drive; Offers over $849,000; 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 95m2 floor area, 8794m2 land area, 2 garages.

It seems the Hunga eruption in Tonga was a one-in–1000-year event:

Radiocarbon dating suggested one major eruption of this scale occurred about AD1100 and another in AD200

And we heard it here at Waikawa Beach, 2,500 Km away. 🌋

For sale: 10 Arthur Street, Waikawa Beach:

Offers Over $709,000; 2 bedrooms; 1 bathroom; 70m2 floor area; 809m2 land area.

Every year a local couple mount a huge display of Christmas Lights on their house. The lights tell a story as Santa and elves move around delivering presents. Now others are putting up displays of lights too, like the tree at the village entrance. It’s fun to visit after dark.

Vehicles on the beach is a hot topic where I live, so this is interesting: Vehicle access to popular Auckland beach to close over holidays

A permit system was introduced in 2015 to manage the volume of traffic and to ensure drivers were aware of their responsibilities and restrictions when traveling along the beach.

We had 100 mm rain (4 inches) in the last 2–3 days. I’ve written about it with photos on the Waikawa Beach Ratepayers Association blog: A bit damp in early December 2021.

For Sale: 38 Manga Pirau Street, Waikawa Beach: 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 80m2 floor area, 809m2 land area.

One of the tracks to the beach that I use has flaxes either side of the entrance. Sometimes the leaves grow right across the track. I couldn’t be bothered asking the Council to trim them, and just did it myself. Only took 15 minutes.

Keeping tempers cool at Waikawa:

There are special bars across our footbridge designed to stop motorbikes from getting onto the bridge. What they actually do is make it very hard for human beings to get on the bridge, especially those who have dogs on leads, kids, wheelchairs, mobility issues, pushchairs…

For sale 18 Henham Lane, Waikawa Beach: Bareland, 22155 m².