KEY POINTS:
I'll take you down to the marina," Morris Hansen says, smiling at what is obviously a favourite joke.
The "marina" is a dozen or so fat wooden poles poking up behind giant tufts of rice grass and weeds where a wooden launch rests in mud so thick it
looks like brown sponge.
In the next-door berth is Daisy, his 11.3m-long "house scow" - a cross between a scow and a houseboat - the boat he designed and built from scratch over the past 18 months.
Hansen is 77 years old, a carpenter-turned-boatbuilder who bought seven hectares on the western bank of the Northern Wairoa River just south of Dargaville 34 years ago. The river flows a few metres away from his home at the end of Notorious East Road, alongside Notorious drain.
Both were named by a Dalmatian immigrants who spent more than a year digging a channel to get prized kauri gum from the hills to the river. It became "bloody notorious drain" when the boss refused to pay them because he thought they'd taken too long.
The brown, swift-flowing river might not "look anything much to anyone else" but Hansen always wanted to live here.
"The original homestead was a boarding house for the river, it was all river traffic in those days.
"It'll come back into its own one day, especially when the petrol runs out."
This part of western Northland is kumara country, vast stretches of flat, fertile fields laid out in perfectly-formed furrows where workers sit on a low board at the back of a tractor planting tiny green seedlings. It's a lucrative business - $3 million has just been ploughed into the farm next door.
Daisy looks more caravan than boat, with tiled kitchen bench and shower. She has seven watertight bulkheads so should be unsinkable, although that's what they said about the Titanic and for the same reason.
He'll launch her in a couple of weeks. She draws just 245mm, you could take her anywhere.
"Good window of weather we might go up the Hokianga."
He's probably joking again but he knows this coast as well as anyone. He worked on barges fishing up kauri logs from the river when he was 17. The log was spiked and hauled to the surface, you had to be careful when it finally came free of the mud.
Mud. It is everywhere along the Wairoa, even at its headwaters at Wairua Falls the river is greenish-brown.
From the falls it travels 150km southwest, widening as it goes until it meets the Kaipara Harbour at Ruawai.
"If it was a blue water river this would be the Mediterranean," says Noel Hilliam, a former businessman turned shipwreck explorer, amateur historian and driving force behind the Dargaville Museum.
It sits atop Mt Wesley with spectacular views over the river flats below where a long bridge over the river leads to Dargaville. On the opposite bank green fertile fields stretch as far as the eye can see.
His great-grandparents settled here and he has never wanted to live anywhere else. He's a walking encyclopaedia on this part of Northland: the Manchurian rice grass growing metres high along both sides of the river came as seeds on bricks used as ship's ballast in the 1920s and has been spreading ever since; Northland supplies 85 per cent of the country's kumara crop; the river is 8 per cent saline at Dargaville; along with millions of kauri, 21 million kahikatea trees were felled here during European settlement and the silt has been draining into the Northern Wairoa ever since.
During a quick museum tour, Hilliam points to beautiful kauri furniture that once belonged to his grandmother.
"It would fetch a mint now but none of the family heirlooms were sold. It's only money."
He seems to have a genuine love for the river. He can't understand why more people don't drive up to the old Wilson Homestead at Tangiteroria where you can watch the "tidal bore" twice a month, a surge of water that rushes upriver on a new or full moon at five hours before high tide on the Manukau Harbour.
The river is tidal for almost all its length, Chris Matich sails with the tide up and back to Dargaville when he's after flounder in summer. It saves on fuel.
Generations of his family have fished from Ruawai at the river mouth but he doesn't really like fishing the river.
"It's muddy, horrible."
He is 48 years old with a tanned, unshaven face. Standing in the gravel carpark where Ruawai Wharf Rd stops at the river, he is gazing at an old wooden launch that his 15-year-old nephew has just bought for $1000. The Matich men reckon she's a bargain.
She's also typical of boats round these parts, white paint peeling off a square cabin and an old stove blocking part of a window.
Matich smiles a rare smile.
"He and his mates'll have some fun in her," he says.
By the time he was eight he was running nets out from his father's boat, and by 14 he was fishing down as far as Port Albert.
Today he was up at 4am. His brother's going out again tonight but he stayed home to mow the lawns and think about moving to Australia.
He wants to pack it in. Bureaucratic red tape is killing the business for independent operators like him.
"You can't just be a fisherman any more, you have to be an accountant, a lawyer, everything.
"My wife would leave tomorrow but it's hard to get out, I'll get almost nothing for the money I've invested."
Once he would have missed the family too much, his parents, brothers and cousins scattered throughout the town.
"But in the last year or two I've started to get bitter.
"Three weeks ago we got new books to fill in, you have to say what time you put the first anchor out, what time you put the last one in and what the weather was like at the time. Every single thing."
The average age of a fisherman now is 50, he says.
"I haven't heard of anyone taking it on."
He swings his ute out of the carpark towards Ruawai and we follow.
Behind us the river flows swiftly past old wooden piles where black-headed terns huddle against a brisk westerly wind coming across the river from the empty green hills on the other side.
