Caring Bay lads give couple huge lift

JONATHAN DOW
Sam and Colleen Shelford were on a mission.
Their friend John Pouto had suffered a stroke and they were driving from New Plymouth to Tolaga Bay to see him.
"The full moon must be a good omen," Colleen, 56, said to husband Sam, 65, as they headed for Napier.
But just after midnight the timing gear on their Holden VK Commodore gave up and they ground to a halt.
The couple were stuck on the Napier-Taupo road, just past the Rangitaiki Tavern.
Within 20 minutes, four cars stopped to see if they could help.
But the Shelfords did not want to leave their car on the side of the road and passed on a message to let friends in Napier know what had happened, and stayed put.
In the fifth car that pulled up were Steve Mills, 33, and Rocky Mewburn, 26, who were heading back to Napier towing a trailer carrying a crash-damaged Subaru they'd just bought in Rotorua for $400.
They weighed up the situation and in true good Samaritan fashion, the Subaru came off the trailer and was replaced with the Shelfords' Holden.
There was not much gas in the Subaru's tank, so the plan was for Rocky to drive as far as he could and leave it on the side of the road.
Rocky took off and the others didn't see him until Bay View, where an attendant put petrol into the damaged car.
In Napier a couple of hours later, they woke Steve's wife Julie, who made up a couple of extra beds.
The Shelfords were grateful, but still did not know how they were to get to Tolaga Bay.
First thing in the morning, Steve went to see his mate, next-door neighbour Darren Barber, who races Commodore street stocks at the speedway.
"What year Holden?" Darren asked, then spent an hour pulling parts out of a spare engine, rang his father to find a crucial part, and headed over to Steve's place. By 2pm the Shelfords were on the road again.
They spent the night with John Poutu and headed back to New Plymouth, where Sam had work at Rylock Windows on Monday. The headlines that day, Friday, March 17, were not good: A young girl killed while climbing a tree in Flaxmere, a Chinese woman kidnapped in Auckland.
But this story, about what a family and their friends did for them, was what the Shelfords were still talking about weeks later.
The last word goes to Sam: "What they did for us, to drive that wobbly thing as far as that ... they're out of this world, man. Beautiful."