Bulldozers and Fishing

The South Island from Ngawi

Built on the side of New Zealand’s North Islands most southerly coast, Ngawi boasts the most bulldozers per head of population in the world. You would wonder why, but when you get there, it’s obvious as the coast is so rugged that the fishing fleet is pushed into the sea and pulled out again by bulldozers. Mounted on an enormous cradle, each boat has its own bulldozer, to push it over the rocky foreshore to the sea. The launching spot is in a small bay that gives a little shelter from confused seas where Cook Straight flows between the two islands from the Tasman to the Pacific Ocean,

Getting to Ngawi is a mission the road is simple enough to start with across the plains of the Wairarapa, but just before Lake Ferry, you head east and very quickly upon a sealed road hacked out of the cliffs. The cliffs hug the coast, in places old baches are stuck to the seaward side, waiting for the ocean to rise and wash them away. Some condemned, looking every bit like that, others grimly hanging onto the bolder ridden shore, a road to the back and the pounding of the Pacific Ocean in the front. Patches of grass and scrub grasses pretending to be gardens with arrangements of old cray pots, nets and buoys strewn in deliberate order to represent some kind of beach art.