Hawke's Bay residents are cleaning up and counting the cost after major flooding hit the region at Easter. For some, it brought back memories from half a century ago.
Come hell or high water, Evan Jones made sure the news was delivered.
Jones was a 13-year-old student at Napier's Colenso High School in June 1963 when his Daily Telegraph delivery route was hit by severe flooding.
Jones said he never considered hanging up his paper bag and waiting out the storm: "I just blindly went ahead."
The flood waters swirling over his knees did not worry him as he trudged down Harold Holt Ave on a dark, stormy evening.
"It was quite exhilarating at the time.
"I was young and out in the wet and puddling around. It was something out of the ordinary."
Jones returned home soaked to the skin and spent the following week bed-ridden with pneumonia.
"I don't think it was very good for me."
The Onekawa neighbourhood that suffered so badly in 1963 was a new suburb at the time, with incomplete drainage systems.
Jones, now retired from a career in teaching and still living in Napier, said the drainage had been fixed and the area had escaped flooding two weeks ago.
Unfortunately, Jones' own property in Taradale had drain blockages in the recent deluge - and was swamped.
Jones found himself wading through flood waters once more. "It was mucky," he says.
Coincidentally, that day Jones was cleaning out his late mother's house and came across an old copy of the New Zealand Herald featuring a photograph of him that she had kept since 1963.
With flood waters now subsided, Napier residents can expect to keep their feet dry for the foreseeable future.
Philip Duncan of WeatherWatch predicts a change in the weather pattern system will see an end to soggy weather in the Hawke's Bay (see below).
The northerly wind flow that has dominated New Zealand's weather since Easter is set to change next week - to the more traditional west to southwest wind.
"This is a dry wind for Hawke's Bay - in fact, very dry," says Duncan.
"It only turns wet when it turns southerly and comes up the coastline."
But other parts of the country are in for a soaking, and people in low-lying areas of the Eastern Bay of Plenty are warned to keep an eye out for flooding.
