For Sale: 8 Sand Dune Grove, Waikawa Beach.

I had an idea, worked on it with a friend and today we’re launching a summer photo event for Waikawa Beach: Wow Waikawa! Folks submit photos that show the delight of Waikawa Beach, we print some and put them up over summer. It’s been fun getting things ready.

Short on sleep this morning, so my brain cells are groggy. Not convenient when I have a committee meeting for Waikawa Beach Ratepayers Association to attend, with a long agenda.

Today I was rung by someone from LINZ who asked if I could put the broken marker post I reported yesterday back in the ground.

When I dug into the hole I could see the post had been snapped off. There is a building site opposite and I suspect a truck ran it over.

Waikawa Beach, 3 properties for sale:

13 Drake Street

27 Sarah Street

33 Sarah Street

We’ve had 20mm rain today down here at Waikawa Beach at the coast. I imagine that up in the hills there’s been a great deal more. There’s a lot of water about in the paddocks and on the sides of the road.

The river is very full and flowing fairly strongly.

There are only about 150-200 Kotuku, White herons in Aotearoa New Zealand and they are rarely seen beyond their breeding ground on the South Island. Miraculously there has been one at Waikawa Beach for a couple of days. Today I took photos of this magnificent bird.

I often bike around Waikawa Beach on a ~9 Km circuit. Yesterday I went beyond this slightly for a ~12 Km circuit and turned the battery on my electric bike off for ~4Km. Today I’m slightly achey. I have till April to build up for my West Coast Wilderness bike tour. 🚴🏼‍♀️

Spammers crack me up sometimes — ‘sping’⁉️From our Waikawa Beach community blog:

Hello, You misspelled the word “sping” On your website. Sometimes errors > like can hurt your web traffic. Maybe check out a service that alerts > you to issues like … [urls] -Fred

Today I walked on the other side of the Waikawa River, heading north. After floundering through undergrowth to avoid a wet-weather lake I eventually found a wide, smooth, well-used track. After ~1 Km I turned west, found my way through the dunes to the beach and an easy return.

To start with we needed to travel from home to Invercargill. That meant setting off with our neighbours in the car at about 0915. We drove ~100 Km to Wellington Airport, parked in the long-term carpark, caught the free shuttle to the terminal and hung around until the flight left around 1230. Because it was a local flight on a small plane we didn’t have to go through security.

After a 1 hour flight to Christchurch, enjoying views of the snow-capped Kaikouras, we had a quick lunch and boarded the local flight to Invercargill, so again, no security rigmarole to worry about.

This time it was about an hour and a half, with views of snow capped Alps, but not on my side of the plane.

Finally we saw the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter and a small nearby wind farm, banked to the east and landed at Invercargill, Waihōpai.

Our tour leader, Alison, met us and kindly drove us to the Quest Hotel in the middle of Waihōpai, where we shared a comfortable 2 room apartment with our neighbours Chris & Jan from Waikawa Beach.

Alison had organised a meal for most of the tour group at The Rocks, a few minutes walk away.

With a group of 20 to feed, along with other customers, our meal was a long time coming, but it was worth the wait.

The restaurant was pretty noisy so conversation was a bit tricky, but it was a good chance to introduce ourselves to a couple of our fellow travellers. My neighbour had travelled from Palmerston North, while the person across the table from me came from north of Whangārei.

It was early to bed for me, though Deb joined the end of a Zoom call for the training she’s completing this year.

Tuesday 20 July 2021.

Heh, the telephoto lens makes Kāpiti Island look like you could wade out to it — it’s actually 20Km away. A shot of birds in the estuary at Waikawa Beach this morning.

The river at Waikawa Beach was pretty high the other day after loads of rain — it had been higher than this photo shows. Then today it was really really low. Maybe because it broke through the sand bar at the mouth it’s able to flow out more easily?

So much rain over the weekend localised flooding closed a couple of roads. The Waikawa Beach river’s running very swift — we had 43mm rain (1.6 inches), but up in the hills they surely had a heap more. The river has also managed to breach the sandbar and flow directly to the sea.

We had an unusual event at Waikawa Beach this weekend: the launch of a Little Free Library created by a couple of members of the community. Here’s Anja giving a speech before cutting the ribbon. And that’s the back of me as I introduced Anja to the 40 or 50 folks who attended. 📚

Whew! A busy day doing various tasks for our local Waikawa Beach Ratepayers Association: emails, blog posts, some admin stuff, update the list of members, liaise with the Horowhenua District Council about a dumped trampoline — perfect for a cool, rainy day.

On 05 May I posted about a neighbouring property for sale: Waikawa Beach For Sale: 146 Strathnaver Drive. When we drove past this afternoon it had a Sold sign on it. 5 days. Not bad.

Waikawa Beach For Sale: 146 Strathnaver Drive:

2 bedrooms; 1 bathroom; 50m2 floor area; 3464m2 land area. Buyer Enquiry Over $695,000

Neighbours of ours. In the photo our place is the white dot near top right.

Waikawa Beach For Sale: 61-63 Manga Pirau Street:

2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 70m2 floor area; 827m2 land area. Two immediate beachfront sections. Includes self contained very well appointed tiny house.

Will it sell? Land already half lost to storms. Sea rise and storms are threats.

Later this month we Kiwis can see a total lunar eclipse. I wrote about it on the blog for the local Waikawa Beach community: Later this month we Kiwis can see a total lunar eclipse. [Link updated 02 May 2025.]

This was originally posted as Look up! — There's a lunar eclipse on 26 May 2021 on 02 May 2021 on the WBRA blog. A change of 'ownership' there led to a terrible act of vandalism where they removed a huge number of posts, including this one, from the archive.

While I was able to retrieve the text, the images are unfortunately lost. I've left the coding in, in case I manage to retrieve the images later.

Once night falls I step out on the deck at Waikawa Beach and can see the glow from the lights of Ōtaki, Masterton, Levin and Palmerston North. Fortunately though, with no street lights nearby, I can look a little higher and see stars, galaxies, planets, Moon and occasional satellites shining against the dark of the sky.

Recently Strathnaver resident Jaye Pere pointed her telescope at the full Moon (Facebook link), attached her Samsung Galaxy S10 to the eyepiece and took these amazing photos.

We're so lucky here to have few streetlights and few house lights, meaning the sky is good and dark, and even fainter celestial bodies are easy to see. Take that Wellington!

Full moon, late April 2021. Photo by Jaye Pere.

Full moon, late April 2021. Photo by Jaye Pere.

Full moon, late April 2021. Photo by Jaye Pere.

Full moon early in 2021. Photo by Jaye Pere.

Even a small pair of binoculars will show detail on the Moon (te marama), and may show you stars (ngā whetū) where you didn't think there were any. But it all depends on that nice dark sky.

Now, if you're in the mood for a total lunar eclipse there is one coming up at the end of May: (clouds willing) we'll be able to see a total eclipse of the moon from Waikawa Beach on 26 May 2021. The best stuff happens between 11 pm and 11.30 pm, but the show starts around 8.45 pm.You won't really see much then, but start watching at 9.45 pm to see the Moon start turning red.

And even if the sky doesn't interest you personally that much, maybe you could help out your neighbours by being careful with lights: point security lights towards the ground, turn off lights that don't need to be on (and save on power bills), and think about closing the curtains.

Waikawa Beach for sale: 4/17 Strathnaver Drive:

Asking price $450,000; 0.50ha Bare Land. Deadline Sale, closing 11am Tuesday 20th April, 2021 (unless sold prior).

450 Km to drive home today. We plan to go down through National Park again but then through Whanganui rather than Waiouru. Just for a change. Meeting friends for lunch at National Park (they’ve been down to Levin — we had lunch with them at Bulls when we came north).

Hey @JohnPhilpin A year ago today you visited me at Waikawa Beach: miraz.me/2020/03/2… 😎

For the longest time I thought we had Banded dotterels at Waikawa Beach but after close investigation I now think they are the very similar Wrybills. I’m pretty sure that beak has a curve to the right.

Length: 20 cm; Weight: 55 grams.

🐦