FIRST IMPRESSIONS - Column

Secluded spot promises to be holy grail of beaches
There's a beach, stashed away in Coromandel's Wainuiototo Bay, that I can't stop dreaming about. Emerald green water. Soft, powdery sand. It is reachable only by wading through an estuary at low tide.
New Chums Beach conjures the fanciful kind of mystique of Alex Garland's The Beach, or Robert Louis Stevenson's The Beach of Falesa.
But New Chums isn't much of a secret at all, having been publicised by United Kingdom's Guardian newspaper in a 2006 list of the world's top 20 deserted beaches, and this week through media attention around a campaign to save it from a controversial housing development.
The way they've described it - untouched, peaceful, tranquil - has convinced me I could move up there to become the resident hermit if the subdivision gets scrapped.
My home could be a rough bungalow fashioned from pohutukawa trees, my nightly meal a speared kahawai, my time only measured by the growth of my scraggly, sandy beard.
I'm counting on it to be the holy grail that ends my search for the country's perfect beach, which I've come close to finding a few times - here are my top five:
5. Castlepoint Beach, Wairarapa.
A surfer's paradise it ain't, but drift among the gentle waves in a summer sunset and you'll never forget it. On a clear evening, your eye can follow the rugged 'Rapa coast all the way up to Cape Turnagain, and on your right looms Castle Rock, crowned by Castlepoint's lighthouse.
4. Main Beach, Mount Maunganui.
After shifting here at the end of winter, I was so impatient for a swim at the Mount that I could wait only until early September. A wetsuited surfer paddled past, shaking his head at the blue-faced shivering idiot waiting to become a cautionary tale about hypothermia. But my early-evening dip there on New Year's Day had me wondering why I'd earlier bothered driving 100km away to Ohope Beach to find no car parks, no decent waves and the splendid aroma of a rotting seagull.
3. Waipatiki Beach, Hawke's Bay.
A 45min drive from Napier, Waipatiki Beach is a stretch of grainy sand jammed between two rocky heads at the opening of a tiny valley. My favourite feature of the beach is a bank that rises steeply from the water at low tide, because it once grounded my girlfriend while she was giving me a body-surfing lesson. She first thought the smiles from young spectators on the beach were a result of her gnarly body-surfing skills. Then she looked down to see a wayward bikini top ... and what the kids were really grinning about.
2. Coopers Beach, Far North.
Touted as one of the safest beaches in Northland, Coopers Beach might also be the most majestic. Like Castlepoint, you're not likely to find any big waves there but Coopers' shady fringe of pohutukawas is what most beachgoers remember it for. You can collapse beneath them after swimming the length of the beach and devour a crayfish salad from New Zealand's best chippy - the Mangonui Fish Shop.
1. Ocean Beach, Hawke's Bay.
Good for waves and walks along its wide, endless expanse, Ocean Beach is an all-round winner and my favourite seaside spot.
It's also loved by brainsick seasonal workers who like to swim way out past the beach's sandbar and throw themselves against towering dumpers, which should really guarantee them a concussion and an IRB ride back to the shore. Yet the mad bastards are back there each summer, getting tossed about in the surf like flotsam and providing better beach-side entertainment than a bikini malfunction.
I'm hoping Ocean Beach will be dislodged from the top spot after I make it up to Coromandel this month - and if that happens then I probably won't be back to write about it. If you ever wonder where I went, the scraggly bearded guy at New Chums Beach might be able to tell you.