I killed a few hours on a recent visit to the Bay by visiting one of those spots and I rapidly decided that there was no way I would risk my kids or grandkids in what now looks like a diluted sewer.
Lake Tutira on the road to Wairoa was another favoured swimming venue when we were young but this, I'm told, is also now too polluted to risk these days.
The Labour Party's policy of charging commercial water users a royalty of one or two cents a cubic metre to fund the cleanup of our rivers and lakes generated an over the top response from National Party linked commentators who destroyed their argument by mad exaggeration of the fee's likely impact.
Even at two cents per cubic metre the cost would amount to roughly $10 an acre for the orchards which surround Hastings and even less for vineyards.
Auckland householders would be envious of a one or two cents a cubic metre charge, as those who examine the fine print on their Watercare Services bill will discover that when you add together their water and waste water charges they are paying 40 cents a cubic metre and that doesn't include a further monthly charge to maintains the pipes.
Bill English's assertion in last week's leaders' debate that extra money of the sort generated by the Labour Party's proposed water royalty won't be necessary and the National Government was doing enough to clean up the mess was explicitly contradicted by his own Tukituki candidate, Lawrence Yule in the Local Government New Zealand magazine of July this year.
Writing about freshwater resources and drinking water standards Lawrence Yule says "achieving these high standards will take time and will come with costs. We need to identify what these costs are and have serious conversations with our communities about trade-offs and how we pay for the work that will be needed."
There is no better example of the political and administrative shambles that has been allowed to develop around water issues by the National-led government than the threat of Water Conservation Order (WCO) on the Ngaruroro and Clive Rivers.
The WCO is a central government process that cuts across and potentially makes nonsense of the locally established TANK initiative, an inclusive collaboration which was set up to make recommendations to the Regional Planning Committee on the future use of land and water resources in the Tutaekuri, Ahuriri, and Ngaruroro and Karamu catchments.
I ran into one of these WCOs some years ago when a group of Nelson investors tried to build a small but much needed hydroelectric development on a back country river in the South Island.
This river had a WCO for white water rafting and although this virtually never happened and the developers had a plan to "turn on" the river when and if rafters turned up, we couldn't get around the WCO and the project never happened.
I'm told that Conservation Minister Nick Smith has the power to stop this WCO in its tracks, and given the fact that there is local action on the matter via the TANK process; it's very hard to understand why he doesn't.
If Bill English is wondering why polls are now turning against National, my belief is that this is at least partly because his government has left too many of these problems to fester for far too long.
Water issues are not the only matters met by government inertia. With first home buyers now largely squeezed out of the housing market we are turning into a nation of renters just when the available rental accommodation supply can't cope with the demand.
Jacinda Ardern has become a catalyst for these concerns to emerge.
She has played her hand very well.
More fun to come!!
Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.
