Susan Buckland: And the sailor home to the sea

COMMENT

When Tom Maunder told me he was going to pack in his job as manager of the Manupirua Hot Springs at Lake Rotoiti I knew I would miss him - even though Tom calls a spade a shovel and I've seen him make people feel as if they've been whacked over the head with the larger of those instruments.

But Tom reserved that treatment for people who dismissed his offer of a helping hand to tie their boats at the hot pools and then went on to mash the jetties.

Tom is a boatman from way back who has taken his fishing boat through all sorts of weather and brought it safely home again. So don't try telling him how to berth a boat in foul wind or fair.

Hell, Tom has lived all his working life outdoors, felling trees, building houses and farm fences, concreting, bricking. Experience counts.

He was in his 70s when he took up the manager's job at the hot pools. A major slip had crashed a tree on to the pools and the spring house. But the sorry state in which he found them was no deterrent. He rolled up his sleeves and got stuck in.

He removed the debris, shipped in new materials (you can reach the pools by boat only), rebuilt the fences and shed, rebuilt and concreted the paths.

And people began coming back to soak in the pools, long a favourite pastime at Lake Rotoiti.

Soon you had to jostle for a berth for your boat and Tom was chuffed about the turnaround. During those peak times he had to hire temporary help, although it went against the grain. Tom, the gritty outdoors man, was used to running the show single-handed.

But turn a place around and you get customers. Plenty of them. And Tom wasn't having a bar of bulging money bags on the premises. The hired help would get explicit instructions: "Don't let me down, mate." And Tom would take off in his boat for other side of the lake and the bank in Rotorua.

Tom softened when he talked to me about his wife, who had died some years ago. Sometimes I would arrive at the pools to find his friend installed, a woman about 20 years his junior.

But it was Tom who rose at sparrow's every morning to empty the pools, scrub them clean and fill them again with the thermally heated water gushing from the cliff behind. "Want them spick and span," he would say.

And I was glad of his eagle eye when I carelessly left my watch beside a pool and had to race back in the boat.

"A couple of teenagers told me it was theirs," said Tom before I could leap on to the jetty. "That's them fleeing across the lake. Chase the little blighters. If they turn up here again they'll wonder what's hit them."

The proverbial shovel, for sure.

But observe Tom's rules and his no-nonsense demeanour would melt. His sense of humour, wicked at times, would take him chuckling from pool to pool.

Often when I dropped by the pools he would proudly point out some new enhancement - he had built another jetty, and another pool. "There are six now," he would say in a pleased voice.

This summer, the last of three as manager, Tom completed a picnic shelter and table.

Now he's gone. To Kawau Island in the Hauraki Gulf. Rosie, his beloved launch which he built himself, has gone with him. He is looking forward to taking her out to catch snapper. He loves the lake but it's time to return to the sea.

Fair enough, Tom, but you will be a hard act to follow.