Outward Bound's 2003 McKenzie Watch celebrate their 20th anniversary reunion in Hahei.
They met as strangers in 2003 but through life and death, the surviving members of Outward Bound’s McKenzie Watch have forged an unbreakable bond of friendship. Joanna Wane joined them in Hahei for their 20th annual reunion.
Michael Rothery didn’t quite know what to make of it when his wife, Yvonne, packed her bags and went off-grid without him.
When they got married, she was 18 and still living with her parents. In more than 25 years together – bringing up three children and running their own business – the Kāwhia couple had never spent a holiday apart.
Maybe she was having a midlife crisis, he worried. Maybe she was thinking about trading him in. “I thought, ‘What the hell is my wife wanting to go and do this for? And is she going to come back different?’” he says. “That was a bit scary.”
Yvonne, who’d been sponsored on the eight-day Outward Bound course by her local branch of Rural Women NZ, cried on the train all the way to Wellington.
It was late autumn in 2003 when the group of 11 strangers gathered at the ferry terminal in Picton, where their phones were taken into custody, cutting off contact with the outside world.
Among them were a couple of farmers, a legal secretary, a single parent who worked in marketing, a stay-at-home mum, a company owner, and a crime watch volunteer who did her patrols on horseback. The youngest, a biosecurity officer with Environment Canterbury, had just turned 40.
By the time they went their separate ways, they were bonded for life.
Over the past two decades, they’ve seen each other through good times and bad: celebrating the births of 53 grandchildren, losing one of their group to cancer and supporting another through her own brush with mortality.
Next year, the 10 surviving members of McKenzie Watch will hold their 21st annual reunion in Napier, travelling from around New Zealand for a raucous weekend that will conclude with an AGM on the final night to decide on the venue for their next adventure.
Past expeditions (with partners along, too) have included sea kayaking, mud racing, abseiling, mountain biking, tramping, rock climbing and beach yoga. The only year they’ve missed was in 2020, when their plans were upended by the Covid lockdowns.
It’s true that as their hair has greyed and their bodies have slowed, the reunions have become a little less strenuous – although Bev, the oldest in her mid-70s, is perhaps the fittest of the lot, despite two knee replacements. But the friendships they’ve forged go far deeper.
Last year, Peter and his wife, Vicky, were rescued by helicopter, along with their fox terrier, from the roof of their woolshed during the catastrophic Wairoa floods. Simon, a fellow farmer, immediately got on the phone to offer help with the clean-up.
When Janet arrived at the Outward Bound base in Anakiwa, at the southern end of the Queen Charlotte track, she was a single parent with three children and had lost her mother and father less than a year apart. “It was a difficult time,” she says. “All of a sudden I felt, yeah, very alone.”
Spending those eight days in the Marlborough Sounds was a transformational experience for her. Back home, Janet quit her marketing job and set up her own business. Now a trained naturopath and herbalist, she was working as a health coach when fate tossed her another curveball.
In late 2020, she was diagnosed with acute leukaemia. One of her brothers was a positive match for a stem-cell transplant and she spent Christmas in an isolation unit at Wellington Hospital as part of a six-week treatment programme.
Rallying in support, all her old team-mates recorded video messages for her, which were compiled into a single reel. “I just used to watch it over and over, so it was very special,” says Janet, who still gets emotional thinking about it.
“Outward Bound teaches you that you can’t be in control of everything. You have to tap into your resources all the time, and these people are one of my life’s resources. They’ve been an amazing part of my journey.”
I can hear them long before I see them at Hahei Beach Resort in the Coromandel, where McKenzie Watch has gathered for the weekend to celebrate their 20th reunion, renting two adjacent villas. Yvonne and Michael’s impressively kitted-out mobile home is parked up next door.
By Friday evening, the last of the gang has arrived and the stories are in full swing. How Jenny got lost in the dark camping out on solo for 48 hours and thought Janet was a wild pig when she came through the bush to her rescue.
How Janet was mean to Yvonne that first night when they kipped down in a boat shed on the first night, after rowing and sailing a seven-tonne cutter from Picton to Torea Bay on their way to Anakiwa. (“I probably was mean to her,” Janet admits to me later. “My challenge was to stop thinking about myself. I had to learn it’s not about me, it’s about us.”)
How the three men – outnumbered by nine women – took control on the tramps, arguing over the map. The day they all ate lunch in a tree. “On the first night, they’re all full of bullshit,” Michael tells me, with a laugh. “They’re so happy to all be together again. It’s incredible how they pick up just like that.”
The weekend itinerary in Hahei includes a boat tour along 25km of volcanic coastline from Cathedral Cove to the Orua sea cave, one of the largest in New Zealand; a walk to the historic pā site on the Te Pare headland; snorkelling in the bay; and a dig-your-own hole thermal soak in the sand at Hot Water Beach.
Only Vicki couldn’t make the reunion this year. Absences are rare, although Sue – who was working in community and economic development for the Manukau City Council when she did the course – missed three years in a row when she and her husband were living in Abu Dhabi.
“They were always in my heart,” she says. “When we came back and rocked up, it was like being back with long-lost friends.”
Hahei is Bev’s turangawaewae: her grandfather was the second Pākehā to settle in the area, in the early 1900s. The sea is sparkling with silvery late-summer sunlight and the water is so clear we spot a stingray swimming by in the shallows.
Bev, who’s what you might call an “active relaxer”, admits she went stir-crazy on solo, a core experience of every Outward Bound course. “I couldn’t see the point of sitting in the bush in the damp, wasting all this time contemplating our navels.”
Jenny loved it. “I’m a bit quiet by nature so being the only South Islander with such an outgoing group of people was quite challenging for me.”
Does she feel going to Outward Bound made a lasting impact on her? “Definitely,” she says. “Like when we were doing our tramp and then on solo, not having a hot drink for a few days – you’d think our throats were cut!” she says. “But in actual fact, they’re minor things. You can do anything and overcome anything, if you want to and need to. That’s what I came away with.”
Hilary, who runs a learning and development consultancy in Wellington, was another outlier among the crew, although in a different way. A political animal, more at home in the city and active on the political left, she’d migrated from the UK in the early 90s to escape the legacy of Thatcherism.
Less physically fit than her hardier team-mates, she was doubled up with pain one morning and rushed to hospital with suspected appendicitis. Diagnosed with a torn muscle and dosed up on morphine, she returned to complete the course, which concluded with a 12km run.
“I found all the physical stuff very, very hard,” says Hilary, who’s dressed for the Sunday morning walk to the pā site in long sleeves and a wide-brimmed hat to protect her pale English skin.
“But then on the last night, when they said we were going into the hall to contemplate ourselves, the others were all worried and I thought, ‘Oh, thank God, this is the easy stuff.’ And Susan really enjoyed that, too. She got it. It just shows how different we all are.”
As part of her sponsorship deal, Yvonne was required to give a talk to Rural Women NZ when she got back. Terrified of public speaking, she turned to Hilary for a few tips – which included taking along some props, like the poo bucket they had to use on solo as part of Outward Bound’s “leave no trace behind” philosophy.
“I used to wag school when it came to speeches,” says Yvonne. “Through her business, Hilary had a set of skills we didn’t have. So we all helped her with the physical stuff, then she helped us. And she was still keeping up her running years later.”
Hilary has hosted two weekend gatherings in the capital so far, although the weather was so awful for one of them that a planned trip to Matiu/Somes Island had to be abandoned. “If they came to Wellington again, I could take them around Parliament,” she says, mischievously. “That’d be interesting, wouldn’t it?”
At each reunion now, there’s an empty chair for Martin, who died of cancer a few years ago at the age of 65.
That first night they all met, he’d introduced himself as a drug pusher. He was actually a pharmaceutical rep. So, Martin was a character, but he did have his demons. Less fit than Hilary, he had a secret stash of cigarettes and struggled on the tramps, with the rest of the group taking turns to carry his pack.
At the end of the course, he refused to accept his graduation pin. But those eight days changed him, too. He gave up gambling. Then he stopped drinking. After retraining as a prison officer, he finally kicked his nicotine addiction when the prisons went smoke-free.
“He said it wasn’t fair for him to come in smelling of smoke when [the inmates] weren’t allowed to,” says Laurie. “We’ve all got one or two things we need to work on. He managed all three before he died and that’s pretty amazing. I think he was stronger than any of us realised.”
The group’s unofficial camp mother, Laurie has been instrumental in keeping their bonds strong through the years. It was Laurie who first contacted me after reading a story I’d written about my own time at Outward Bound doing the same course.
“It goes without saying,” she wrote, “that if you want to come to Hahei when we are there, to see a bunch of crazy folk having a blast of a time, having met as strangers and become strong friends, all through Outward Bound, you would be most welcome.”
Laurie’s family pooled together to give her the course as a 50th birthday present. Friends did the same for Simon’s 50th and he wants to gift his grandchildren the experience, too.
Before moving to Hawke’s Bay, he and his wife, Rosie, hosted reunions at their farm in Matira, where they also ran an adventure business taking people through the 2km cave system on their property.
An experienced mountain climber in his younger days, he loved the physicality of his time at Anakiwa. When they all had to jump off the cutter and swim to shore, the water was so shockingly cold Laurie almost had a panic attack; it was Simon who held her up in the water with one hand and calmly told her to breathe.
“Really, we only see each other once a year, but we’ve cemented a pretty strong bond,” he says. “It’s an unusual sort of thing, but it’s certainly very special.
“We lost somebody early on in the piece. But apart from that, we’ve been very lucky. We’ve still got Janet here and she’s looking a million bloody dollars.”
On the Saturday night, Yvonne had made a macadamia nut slice for dessert and cooked up some whitebait Michael had caught. It turned out he was right – Outward Bound did change his wife.
“It was the first time in my life I’d been alone,” says Yvonne, who discovered she liked her own company and found the confidence to begin a new career in the real estate industry, after being out of the workforce since having children. “I came home feeling 10-feet high and invincible.”
Michael was there waiting for her at the airport. He’d made a roast dinner, putting flowers on the table and steeping rose petals in a hot bath.
“I learnt how to row and sail a seven-tonne cutter, how to read a compass and a topographical map, how to rock climb a 20m face and abseil down, do a high ropes course 8m up in the kahikatea, run 12km, have lunch up a tree, and that it didn’t matter to wear the same knickers for three days in a row!” Yvonne later wrote, in an article for her local paper.
“I learnt lots of things about the three men and seven other women in McKenzie Watch and how everyone shines in a different light. I learnt that in helping others, you often get a larger, unexpected gift in return.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
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