A Work in Progress

My association with Rakino island goes back to the early 1980’s.

My Dad had a sabre 22 trailer sailer which he insisted we spend every school holidays on. In 1982 that meant sailing around the Hauraki Gulf, and my only abiding memory from that trip is anchoring in West Bay, rowing into shore, clambering up the saddle that divides West and Woody Bay, and being completely captivated by the vision of the little islets at the ends of the bay, the unpopulated sandy beaches, the cerulean blue of the sky, and the sizzling heat from crisp, crackling yellow grass underfoot. It was like discovering a castaway’s island.

I imagine I psychologically blocked every other memory of spending days on end with my parents and 12 year old sister on a 22 ft. boat.

Post school holidays and back at home in the small mid-North Island town we lived in I was browsing the property pages when I spied a section for sale on Rakino. For some unfathomable reason it didn’t take much wheedling to encourage my parents to buy it, sight unseen. Probably the pocket change price helped. Regardless, that is how my family came to own a pie-shaped slice of kikuyu infested wetland with no views, in 1983. Luckily we had no inkling of the rat infestation.

My father ‘gave’ it to me in a moment of inebriated weakness back in 1995, but it wasn’t till the early 2000s that we got sufficiently organised to plan an Easter trip with friends, and erect the still-standing garden shed. I recall one of the Johns coming down and saying “Needs more bracing”, approximately three times till it was sufficiently braced to withstand the howling gales of Rakino. I am profoundly grateful for this intervention. I have heard tell of other lesser braced garden sheds that did not have the wisdom of a John to prevent them from buckling and crumpling under the pressure of a fair to middling Rakino storm. At this stage I was still unaware that Rakino had been rid of the rat horror that had plagued the bach owners.

Fast forward to 2017, when in an act of madness we decided to fit out an over-sized green shipping container called ‘Hulk’, and move him over to Rakino, in order to establish a more comfortable campsite. This went horribly wrong, naturally enough, and we were eventually saved from ourselves by donations of timber from Dylan and Les, builder extraordinaire Shaun, two bottle jacks, a couple of winches, some metal pipe rollers, and a quiet Wednesday afternoon.

We now have a reasonably comfortable place to bunk down, with burgeoning decking for impromptu gatherings, and the promise of a roof to protect Hulk’s head whilst collecting much-needed water. We just need to construct a series of boardwalks so as to avoid the aggravation of the biddy-bids that destroy my socks and make my under-garments scratchy. The coming winter will be our third season of tree planting, because we hope some of the tui that blast overhead like a squadron of messerschmitts on a flight path between Mackenzies and Wim and Jo’s will condescend to visit us at some stage. I shall entice them with my soon to be planted kowhai trees. I’m already willing the flax to flower profusely so the kakariki will come calling…

Lisa West.