Northland Land Search and Rescue volunteer Grant Conaghan, demonstrating his abseiling skills, has marked 50-years in the service. Photo / File
Northland Land Search and Rescue volunteer Grant Conaghan, demonstrating his abseiling skills, has marked 50-years in the service. Photo / File
People lost in the region's wilderness have been returned to their families for 50 years by Northland Land Search and Rescue (NLSAR) volunteer Grant Conaghan.
The 66-year-old, who calls Whangārei home, is celebrating half a century at his NLSAR volunteer post.
"There's some searches that you know if you hadn'tgone out looking for them they wouldn't have survived," Conaghan said. "It's been a great ride so far and it hasn't stopped yet."
Conaghan said he was still pinching himself after yesterday's
announcement that he was to receive the Queen's Service Medal for his work in search and rescue.
Northland Land Search and Rescue volunteer Grant Conaghan is still pinching himself after he was named a recipient of the Queen's Service Medal. Photo / Michael Cunningham
He has been everything from team member, team leader, search manager, to his current roles as an adviser to police and as a training officer.
"The highlight is finding somebody and bringing them home," Conaghan said. "Like one girl we rescued out of the Waipū cave system. A few years later she got married, had kids, and we know bloody well that if it wasn't for our efforts she wouldn't be alive."
The girl – lost inside the cave - was cold, wet, almost at the point of hypothermia when Conaghan and his team located her.
The "bloody hard" days were the ones that involved a body recovery.
"I think about them, I try not to dwell on them. I think about the positives of being able to give closure to the families."
One particular memory that stuck with Conaghan was when NLSAR found the body of a woman missing in the Far North for three weeks.
The grateful families of the woman and her partner invited the NLSAR team to the tangi.
"They didn't know us from a bar of soap but we'd gone up, complete strangers, to help look for somebody that they loved," Conaghan said. "That's what we do it for."
And the even tougher days were ones that concluded empty-handed, he said.
"I don't know if there's enough fingers on these hands to tell you the number of people we haven't found in Northland."
Conaghan was involved in Northland's longest search and rescue that lasted 10 days in the Waipoua Forest and resulted in the missing man walking out on his own four days later.
When a call comes in it's up to Conaghan to pull the team together and oversee the operation.
Grant Conaghan, far right, with other Northland Land Search and Rescue volunteers Scott McSkimming, left, and Grant Brown in 2018. Photo / File
Before his recent retirement, he would often organise a search and rescue in-between carrying out warrants of fitness at the garage he owned.
"It was pretty full on and stressful. Knowing you had a job to do for your customer and a job to do for the person who was lost."
The nature of the operation varied to include locating downed aircraft, shoreline searches during maritime incidents, through to cliff rescues.
"We are probably the only search and rescue group in the country that has three capabilities in urban or bush, cliff rescue squad, and cave rescue because of the nature of Northland."
If the person missing was elderly or a child – then it was straight out the door, Conaghan said.
The team would prioritise high risk areas, such as hazardous waterways, before moving into less threatening spaces like open land.
Conaghan said on average NLSAR carries out 10 to 15 operations a year, with the majority being fishermen stranded on rocks around the coastline.
Fifty-years-ago, he was drawn into NLSAR as a 16-year-old keen on the great outdoors and following his big brother's footsteps.
"The reason I joined was a lot different from now. I just joined because every search was another day out in the bush and my older brother was in it."
