Fleur Verhoeven made headlines on The Bachelor - especially when her romance to Jordan Mauger crumbled following the show.
After the varied water woes of the first two months of the year, the plans for a huge water storage project in the Makaroro River west of Waipawa, aka the Ruataniwha Dam, were moving closer to ... well, closer.
For a project of such size, the debate hadn't really been around a long time, for it was only in 2008 that the idea really started to take shape, after the release of a list of 14 potential sites.
Roll on eight years and we have a dam projected to cost $250 million suddenly forecast to actually cost about $333m. Whoa!
Public meetings were held in the first fortnight of March, with attendances ranging from more than 200 in Waipawa and in Hastings, but just 16 in Wairoa.
Much of it hinged on buy-in, the purchase of water usage, and there was an indication it was not going as well as supporters hoped when the Central Hawke's Bay District Council decided that for the meantime it would commit itself to something less than 20 per cent of the 1.5 million cu m it had once proposed.
April 18 was reported to be D-Day for a users' sign-up commitment, but it was not until the end the month that the chairman of the Hawke's Bay Regional Council asset company established to drive the project said that with 196 water users signing up to 42.8m cu m of water, the scheme was guaranteed "cash-positive". The dambusters were not convinced and the debate continued.
At the National Aquarium of New Zealand, toward the southern end of Napier's Marine Parade, there was for some time a state of confusion after octopus Inky decided he wasn't going to be dammed by anybody.
Inky seemed to have chosen his moment in the dead of night after his enclosure was left insecure. He would have glided over the top, down the side, crossed the floor and slipped into a drain 50m out to the sea.
Octopuses, octopodes, octopi, as they are varyingly known, are famous escape artists, rather than malcontents, and aquarium manager Rob Yarrell said: "I don't think he was unhappy with us, or lonely, as octopus are solitary creatures," he said.
"But he is such a curious boy. He would want to know what's happening on the outside. That's just his personality."
One who didn't escape was Kan Wee Show, who, about the time Inky was slipping down the drainpipes, was being sentenced in Napier District Court to five and a half years for pouring a bucket of hot water over a workmate in the company cafeteria. The court was told in the incident the previous July, another workmate hit him with the bucket, and that was pretty much the end of the show as the angry man sloped off to his table to finish his lunch.
About 11,730km away in another courtroom, in Canada, things were nowhere near as clear-cut. Former Napier City councillor Peter Beckett had denied murdering second wife Laura Letts Beckett, who had died on a lake fishing trip in 2010. The trial lasted almost three months, but the jury on April 12 announced it couldn't decide. Remanded for a second trial, Beckett was allowed a post-trial interview in jail, and called the trial a "kangaroo court".
Another date with court was set after police chased a stolen vehicle in Napier for more than an hour and a half on the night of May 8. It was at low speed, Facebook users posting messages about the pursuit as the Toyota Hilux and a fleet of police cars criss-crossed the suburbs, their quarry etching a spaghetti-like map of its journey into the asphalt as the rims dug in after the tyres were blown out by spikes laid across the road by the police.
A Hawke's Bay woman who made it big in the social media was Charde Heremia, who, using her Memoirs of a Maori blog site, launched into K Mart in Hastings for not having enough larger sized bras.
To prove a point, she took viewers, who grew in number to more than 440,000, on a cellphone tour of the lingerie department.
The video attracted the interest of a lingerie company which flew her to Auckland, where the problem was solved to the satisfaction of all and sundry.
It was in March and April that we were introduced to the aspirations of young Havelock North women Fleur Verhoeven who somehow got mixed up in the somewhat tacky but popular TV show The Bachelor, vying for the heart of an eligible dude called Jordan Mauger.
A week into May she would win the contest which was billed as reality-romance.
Really?
But nothing really came of it.