This week, the first week of the spring school holidays, the sun finally showed its face after a wet winter. The Mount track was akin to a pre-toll Papamoa highway, with crowds of walkers, families, children and babies. Locals and tourists. Mothers in bright compression pants speed-pushing prams. Dads piggy-backing tired toddlers. Elderly couples proceeding slowly, hand in hand. Kids scrambling up and down the bank, yahooing, brandishing sticks and fossicking in the beachy boulders.
Down below, the water was so calm there was little glimpse of waves, even by the rocks, with the only white-on-blue carved by a lone jetski roaring towards Matakana Island.
As we walked around the track my son, Jack, had spotted a seal sunbathing and leaped off the path down the rocks. My daughter slid after him, scraping her legs on branches as she went, determined to capture a seal selfie. A photo to immortalise the magic of our local walk. A walk where you fall into time-wells of rocky enclaves which offer hours of entertainment collecting shells and rock jumping while fat seals sunbathe.
The next Bay along was marked with an ancient tree, a wooden picnic bench and a grassy clearing. My 8-year-old daughter fingered the white shell rings embedded in the rock below the tree.
"Here's where that little boy went, Mum. It's sad."
That little boy. Jack Dixon. Shelly Beach.
Kids are playing on the rocks below. A man sits on the picnic bench, looking out to sea.
A year ago this week, on a day not unlike this day that thousands like us were experiencing - a school holiday family trip to the Mount changed one family's lives forever.
A year ago on October 1, 5-year-old Bay boy Jack Dixon was with his family playing on Shelly Beach when, posing for a photo by the rocks, he was swept out to sea by a freak wave.
In the days following his disappearance, our whole community was galvanised, desperately searching alongside police, lifeguards and emergency services.
People brought food, organised vigils, set up Facebook pages. Mount Maunganui man Brett Morrison organised a mass paddle-out in the surf below the Mount.
I am not usually one for community grief. I don't understand the need to pile in on Facebook with my love hearts and kisses. Not that there is anything wrong if people want to do this. Each to their own but personally, I have never understood mass grieving. Isn't a family's grief their own? How could we possibly claim to feel it?
But with Jack it felt different. Our reporters are used to facing all sorts of tragedy. It is our job to be objective - not to get too involved - much like police or doctors.
But everyone in our newsroom felt the weight of sadness about this smiling little boy who one day just disappeared into the ocean.
A boy in his All Blacks kit. A boy we all know - all have been, all have. Just as Brett Morrison said in our report this week, we are New Zealanders, that is what we do, we go to beaches.
The Bay community grieved for Jack, a boy we had never met, but felt as if we knew.
Not in a way that tried to claim we could understand the depths of horror and loss and tragedy Jack's family felt, and still face. But we all wanted to bring Jack back home.
In the days following the youngster's disappearance, I met Jack's uncle William - Jack's mum's brother.
William's other sister, mother and his own two sons - Jack's cousins - had been with him on the trip the day he disappeared.
As I sat in William's house on his sofa, the Lego cities Jack had built with his cousins were still sprawled out on the floor.
William spoke of a fun-loving, rough-and-tumble Kiwi lad, who got scratches from cuddling the cat, loved cricket and Lego. William told me that Jack's mum then would not leave the base camp. Jack's dad had been climbing to the top of the Mount at dawn every day to look for his son, through binoculars, at first light.
That same week, the police officer in charge of the case, Karl Wright-St Clair, took me on a walk to Shelly Beach. Him striding in his uniform. Me struggling to keep up, wearing inappropriate footwear, and fumbling to open the gate which astonished Wright-St Clair as he realised I had never walked around the base track before. He insisted one day I walk up at dawn, that many people did, with torches or lights on their heads.
Our chatter stopped as we reached Shelly Beach.
Wright-St Clair looked pensive. It was cold and windy and had begun to rain. The waves soaked our shoes. As we approached the rock where someone had wedged some white flowers, our feet skidded on the wet shells. I scooped one up. We both looked out to sea.
We headed silently back up the bank. Past the shell letters spelling "Jack", which William told me Jack's sisters had made. Past the bank of shells, letters, poems, candles and teddies, where a photo of Jack perched.
A year on, the poems, the paintings and the photo have gone. But memories remain.
Since that day I have walked around the Mount many times. Last month I climbed up it for the first time, at sunset. As I gazed at the waters below, the islands and the bright lights of Mount Maunganui, I felt sheer happiness for the beauty of this place we are privileged to call home.
There was also a thought for a boy I never knew, Jack, and his family who miss him every day.
I imagine mine and my family's experience walking on or up the Mount, past Shelly Beach, is much the same as many people's in the Bay.
We go about our walks laughing, talking and loving our precious moments. But we never walk past Shelly Beach without thinking about Jack.
We respect his family's grief as theirs and theirs alone. But he is a boy who touched a city's soul.
Amidst all the sadness and the tragic loss, emerges the strength of a family, and a community where life goes on.
The sun still rises and falls on Shelly Beach.
It continues to be discovered, played on, enjoyed and loved.
Mount Maunganui will be walked on and climbed up, and called home, by generations of communities to come.
That shell ring I scooped up from that rock a year ago still sits on my desk.
Jack, we will always remember you.
Gone but not lost. The Bay - respectfully - holds you in its heart.
