Waves on the Manukau's wild side

By PETER CALDER

Here's a big one!" says Steve Challis mildly as the whole world fills with water.

The bright day and flat sea have encouraged him to leave a windscreen panel open on the Manukau Coastguard's rigid-hulled inflatable boat, and now the rogue wave that rears before us, a blue-green wall, is about to demand a share of scarce cockpit space. I barely have time to turn my face away from the small flood before it rushes through like a breath and pours off the stern.

Challis, at the wheel, and squadron commodore Paul Connon laugh without flinching. They seem to be enjoying this. My knuckles whiten on the handrail.

It seems a world away from the millpond calm of French Bay where, less than half an hour ago, I was watching kids in P-Classes as they bobbed and bounced around a triangular course barely bigger than a tennis court, close enough to shore to hear their parents' cries of encouragement. "Move your bum forward!" or "Other way! Other way! Other ... oh, dear! Never mind, darling."

The tide was full and the waves, swollen with fallen pohutukawa leaves, flopped lazily on the shelly beach.

Connon and Challis, with casual glee, revved me up before they revved up the Zodiac's growling outboards, drenching me with stories of rescues beyond the bar, in heavy seas at night, of boats full of water with all three bilge pumps out of action.

The anxiety settled a bit on the way out as we nosed into pretty little bays, Laingholm fringed tropically with palms, Cornwallis crammed with picknickers' cars and its long wharf punctuated with idly hopeful Sunday fishers, Huia sleepy and low in a valley not yet touched by the morning sun.

But out here on the bar, the Manukau seems less benevolent.

Fishermen trying their luck near the rock variously known as the Nine Pin or the Shark's Tooth at Whatipu seem almost close enough to speak to as we pass. But in the boat we are all at sea. The waves march before the wind in from the Tasman, rearing in excitement at the sight of land, attacking in random rhythm and from all sides at once.

Challis, not cursing now, but concentrating, rides the sea as though it were a living creature, throttling hard into each wave and settling off the back of it slowly, which is to say with a judder that merely plasters my tongue against the roof of my mouth but does not actually break my knees.

It was on just such a sunlit day as this that the Orpheus foundered, they tell me with the cheerfulness of executioners. I think gloomily of the steam corvette whose wreck, on February 7, 1863, exacted the worst death toll in our maritime history.

Doomed by out-of-date charts and her master's apparently wilful disregard of the frantic signals from the station atop Paratutae at the end of North Head, the warship, laden with stores from Sydney, struck the northern tip of the middle bank. Barely 15m from deep water, less than 100m from dry land, she broached with her head pointing north and was immediately swamped then quickly torn apart by the unforgiving waves. Only 70 of her complement of 259 survived.

Modern technology - sophisticated depth-sounding, global position satellite systems and regular surveying of the shifting bottom - has robbed the bar of much of its terror. Captain Ron McKenzie, former Ports of Auckland harbourmaster, makes an unwitting mockery of my earlier discomfort when he tells me that "most of the big frights about the bar are the ones you hear in public bars these days.

"It's a bit of wild water at times," he says, "but, taken sensibly, there's not much to it."

Certainly it seems unchallenging enough as I stare at it from Evan McGregor's clifftop perch in the signal station on South Head. The station was moved here a few years after the Orpheus disaster and he's watching the passage of a couple of coastal ships, the cement carrier Westport and the Spirit of Resolution, laden with cargo from Lyttelton.

His signals are not the complicated code of clifftop semaphore Signalman Wing sent in vain to the doomed Orpheus; instead he exchanges pleasantries by radio with the ships' masters, who repay his watchfulness by relaying their own readings of the depths beneath their keels as they cross the bar so that any shifts in the sand may be recorded promptly.

"The least I got was 4.9m," comes the cheerfully crackling message from the Westport's master, Ross Sutherland, "and that was only a flicker."

New Zealand's diagonal lean, athwart the meridians of longitude, creates an oddity of latitude: the voyage from Lyttelton to the Manukau Heads, virtually a straight south-north passage, cuts almost 200 nautical miles off the trip around the wide sweep of East Coast and into the Waitemata.

That makes Onehunga an attractive option for coastal shipping, although its tonnages are a fraction of the main port at the city's front door.

But the deep-draught international shipping that arrives from the north has learned to avoid the Manukau.

The bar, as the shifting pattern of sandbanks at the harbour mouth is known, is the single inescapable fact of marine topography that has always made the Manukau the "other harbour."

Shallowness alone would not have consigned it to second place; navigable channels vein its muddy expanse and nudge up into settlements - Drury, Papakura, Waiuku and Onehunga - which owe their existence to the water.

But the wild sea at the harbour entrance is a forbidding barrier. The bar is a shoal of silt and sand dropped by the outgoing tide as it drains the 400 sq km expanse - after the Kaipara it is the country's and the hemisphere's biggest harbour - through an entrance barely 2km wide.

And, once deposited, it does not lie still but rages in constant motion. From his signal station window on South Head, Evan McGregor points out the currents and wild winds that are constantly reshaping the bar and the landscape north and south of the harbour mouth.

When the Orpheus went down, seas lapped against the cliffs at Whatipu where now wide expanses of sand stretch, even at high tide.

To the south, Maori grew kumara and flax on fields that fanned out from the foot of the cliffs, and boats anchored at the end of a peninsular hook that extended well out into the South Channel.

Wise's New Zealand Guide tells us there is "some doubt as to the origin of the name Manukau but the weight of evidence would tend to support the literal translation," which is that it refers to the wading birds that frequent its mudflats. That's by no means accepted by local iwi, though. When Nganeko Minhinnick lodged a claim on the harbour to the Waitangi Tribunal in 1984, she did so in respect of a group calling itself Te Puaha ki Manuka, after the tree that proliferated on its margins.

That claim is widely accepted as having spurred the rescue of the harbour. But Maori still feel they lack control over their traditional waterway. Dennis Ngataki, the environment service manager for the Huakina development trust, which represents 17 marae whose people traditionally gathered food from the Manukau, says the group is seeking management rights under the Fisheries Act.

"A lot of people from the tangata whenua are appointed to various authorities and we have achieved some things, but we want to have more say on the policy side because we are mindful that is where the governing is done."

For Maori, the harbour has ancient links with other waterways to which, in prehistoric times, it was literally joined. Geologists tell us that around three million years ago, the Waikato River drained into the harbour before volcanic eruptions around the areas we now know as Bombay and Pukekohe blocked its path and forced it to seek escape further west. But the harbour remained part of a watery highway that connected the river with the Waitemata Harbour.

According to Maori tradition the Tainui was the first of the great canoes to to reach the harbour when it was hauled over the Tamaki isthmus in the 14th century. But far more recently, the connection between the Waikato and the Manukau was both literal and lucrative. By road, it's almost 10km now from Waiuku to Hoods Landing, on the northern bank of the river just where it widens into something like a tropical delta. But in 1851 the Awaroa stream, snaking north through what is now farmland reclaimed from swamp, took it to within a mile of the new settlement and brought the bounty of the Waikato to Waiuku where it was loaded for Onehunga and, ultimately, Auckland.

"We swept along its umbrageous course at a rapid rate," one trader wrote at the time and predicted that prosperous towns would spring up at either end of the portage.

The opening of the main trunk railway line in 1908 cut Waiuku out of the domestic trade loop, but in pioneer days Tainui proved enterprising traders along that supply route. Figures for 1853 record maize, wheat, fish and pigs pouring across the portage in big tonnages. The suppliers, mindful perhaps that the new settlers longed for a taste of home, sent peaches and cherries that they had grown; only one kete of kumara is included in the year's records.

These days the Waiuku arm ends at the foot of town in a small trickle, hemmed in by mangroves, and the scow Jane Gifford sits on the muddy bottom. But evidence of the Waiuku waterfront's onetime prosperity is not hard to find. In the public bar of the Kentish Hotel, which claims to be the country's longest continuously licensed pub, the walls are covered with old framed photographs of scows and cutters tied up at a busy wharf.

The harbour was the highway for the area until well within living memory. The Awhitu Peninsula, the southern jaw of land enclosing the harbour, leads all the way up to McGregor's signal station, barely 2.5km across the mouth from Paratutae. But the journey by road from the city is some 120km - only slightly less than the trip to Hamilton.

"We never thought of going anywhere by road," says Lloyd Walker, who began farming at Awhitu Central in the 1930s. "Every bay had a wharf."

Not only coastal shipping makes use of the port at Onehunga. A stiff southwesterly is pinning four dozen commercial fishing boats in port on the wintry January day I walk along the wharf edge.

In a cramped basin designed for 20, they are berthed three and four deep. The skippers grumble under their breaths about the conditions - the basin is so silted up that they sit on the bottom at low tide - though the port manager has already told me that dredging the basin would cost many times more than the fleet pays in berthage.

Karl Aislabie, skipper of the 12m Kataraina, has been at sea for 22 years "since just before I was legal," he quips, and he inspects the gloomy squall-laden horizon with the philosophical resignation of a veteran. He's taken advantage of the confinement in port to do some routine maintenance on his boat. By the time the afternoon is over he'll have written cheques for a couple of thousand.

But the albacore tuna are running on the West Coast and the price has just jumped from $2.20 to $3.50 a kilo. There's money to be made - when he can get back to sea.

"It's a lifestyle," Aislabie says as I inspect his cabin's grimy interior, packed with high-tech gear, mostly duplicated to where high-utility pushes comfort into the back seat. "You work your own hours and you don't have to answer to anyone. I tried a land job once but ... " The sentence hangs meaningfully in mid-air.

Aucklanders and out-of-towners alike roar past the Manukau along the motorway from the south, past the muddy flats exposed at low tide. In the way we talk about the water that hugs the Auckland isthmus, north and south, "the harbour" is the Waitemata, as it was named for its sparkling water by those who first navigated it. We think of "the harbour" as the one with "the bridge" across it, the one America's Cup sailors sail up as they return to base.

A large part of the reason for that is that the Manukau Harbour had such a long and bad reputation for its water quality. Paul Walbran, the president of the Manukau Harbour Protection Society, grew up near Waikowhai Beach and remembers "going swimming in the sludge from the freezing works. We thought nothing of it."

These days - largely as a result of the process begun by the 1984 claim - the water quality has improved enormously and the $450m upgrade of Watercare Service's sewage treatment plant at Mangere will advance that cause even further.

The sewage flow - at between 3 and 15 cubic metres a second it is Auckland's biggest river, the staff say, deadpan - will by mid-year be entirely treated in tanks and the effluent, not quite drinkable but certainly of swimming pool quality, will be discharged into the harbour. One by one the sea walls forming the big treatment ponds will be removed and the expanses of shore such as Kiwi Esplanade and Lavender Bay will be restored to places that deserve those names.

No one will watch that process with greater interest than Ray Clough. The 73-year-old retired plumber from Mangere scoffs at the suggestion that I might call him the Bird Man of the Manukau. He's just part of a larger group that seeks to protect the roosts of migratory birds - and, anyway, he covers only a small part of the harbour shore.

His beat is around the sewage sedimentation ponds that will soon disappear and, as we drive together along them, he asks me to slow down so he can check on his charges. We pull up next to a ditch where a pair of stilt chicks, just on fledging, fuss and scurry around their mother.

"There were four there yesterday," he says gloomily. "Cats must have got the rest."

Clough points with quiet pride to the islands created - after some of his gentle persuasion - in the middle of the ponds and the bird hospital he's set up in an old shed. His list of unwitting avian clients is long: spoonbills and sandpipers, oystercatchers and blackfronted dotterels, as well as godwits and knots which make annual pilgrimages the length of the Pacific to Siberia and back - some have come five times.

But it is more than mere sentiment that drives him: bird strike on the runways of the nearby airport is an ever-present danger and maintaining safe roosts for the birds is a safety measure as well as an environmental one.

"What's important is ensuring they can roost in peace away from predators."

Wise heads, then, are watching over the other harbour and the cleanup, if far from complete, is well under way. But the Manukau Harbour Protection Society's Paul Walbran is keen that policymakers don't try to protect the waterway by restricting human impact.

"There has to be an amalgam of environmentalists and users," he says. "It's no use fencing it off. The health of the harbour is promoted by people's access to it."

That's why his society promotes clearing of mangroves where their growth impedes access, and seeks removal of limits on taking Pacific oysters, interlopers which he says are infesting the foreshore.

Legislators "have to see the big picture," he says. "To succeed, you have to have people at large identifying with the harbour."

In the meantime it remains one of the Auckland region's undiscovered treasures.

McGregor may speak for many when he says it's not his kind of harbour - "I like diving," he says, peering down at its silt-cloudy water, "and I like to see what I'm reaching for."

But equally, others see it as something special - and a drive (or a sail) out along the south arm and the peninsula, peeping into pohutukawa-fringed bays such as Clarks Beach or Orua, or the beautifully kept regional park at Awhitu, soon shows you why.

"I've always liked this side," says Ron, a keen fisherman I bumped into on my travels. "It's wilder somehow, more untouched. We always used to say the Waitemata was for fun and the Manukau was for fish."

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