It's a rare enough thing for football in the Far North to see someone take up the whistle, and even more so when that person is a halfway decent player such as in the case of Kaitaia's Grant Morland.

Anyone turning up at Waipapakauri Domain on a rainy afternoon last Saturday could have been forgiven for thinking that the Northland league season had begun early.

Much appreciated

Let's have standards

The organisers of the 2014 90 Mile Beach Snapper Bonanza surfcasting tournament sat down to their Christmas dinner happy in the knowledge that the five-day tournament was shaping up well.

Te Runanga o Te Rarawa has resolved to oppose deep sea oil drilling within its iwi area of interest in the Far North.

Ahipara couple Doug and Jackie Klever could not have wished for a better Christmas gift than the egg laid by one of New Zealand's most endangered birds on the beach at Ahipara.

A Kaitaia teenager has been charged with the aggravated robbery of a Kaitaia service station shortly before midnight on Boxing Day.

In securing the NAKFA Cup last Wednesday, the Rest of the World side cast a long shadow over the annual 7-a-side social midweek summer soccer series on the Kaitaia College top fields.

Us at our best

By Shania Howard

A Kaikohe teenager with big dreams wants to shatter Northlanders' stereotypes of Maori, her school and her home town - and she's made a great start to that with a poem that has taken social media by storm.

The Independent Police Complaints Authority will be investigating a collision between a police four-wheel-drive vehicle and a small sewage truck on State Highway 1 at Pukenui yesterday morning.

Appeals on behalf of Far North families who might not have much to celebrate this Christmas have attracted an extraordinarily generous response, and that continued last week courtesy of a Northland charity and a number of Mid and Far North businesses.

The Far North District Council is still saying nothing about the future of chief executive David Edmunds, despite discussing the issue behind closed doors last week.

Kids first

The run-offs in the Kaitaia leg of the Tux Yarding Challenge are about to begin, featuring the top seven qualifiers from Friday and the top five from earlier on the second day.

Organisers of the annual 7-a-side summer social football tournament have once again issued their usual challenge to other Far North sporting institutions to place gifts under the tree in the office of the Northland Age.

Kaitaia Intermediate School is going to miss Shirley Ogbourne, home economics/food technology teacher there for the last two decades, and her four-legged teacher aide Meg.

Time well spent

How cool was that!

An Auckland couple who own a section at Cooper's Beach accidentally acquired a house recently, after it was delivered to the wrong address. And it clearly didn't want to move.

Some regarded the Croatian immigrants, many of them from the province of Dalmatia, who began arriving in the Far North some 160 years ago, almost universally to dig kauri gum, with suspicion, but they had given much to the new home.

Northland MP Mike Sabin has made no progress over the last year in persuading the Far North District Council to introduce a speed restriction on the beach at Ahipara, but that has all changed now.

Far North duo determined to impress locals at national drifting championships this weekend