Shorelines: Beauty routine for pristine Coromandel coastline

By COLIN MOORE

Joe Scott-Woods goes for a run most mornings. The retired newspaper printer ran to and from his job at the New Zealand Herald for more than 20 years, a regime that kept him fit enough to complete 34 marathons.

Now he takes a daily jog around the streets near his Mt Albert home. And he maintains the routine when he is at the family holiday home at Opito Bay on the east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula.

But when Scott-Woods canters through the bush tracks and along the shoreline of secluded bays, while most other holidaymakers are still in bed recovering from the exertions of the night before, he often carries a box of matches. You need to get up fairly early to find out why, but the simple answer is rubbish - other people's.

Like hundreds of others around the country, Scott-Woods uses his daily exercise to clean the shorelines of the flotsam and jetsam left by the tide and thoughtless fellow holidaymakers.

Sitting around a small driftwood fire on the beach at night is a traditional teenage summer pastime and mostly harmless. But it tends to be the adults who are out there early in the morning collecting discarded bottles and raking the embers for the shards left by some hooligan who has smashed a bottle in the flames.

I have been to campsites in Australia, reached only by four-wheel-drive vehicles, where the campers bring in great stacks of beer but somehow have no room - or wit - to take the empties away with them.

And I have watched in admiration as commercial guides and hundreds of others in the outdoors stoop to pick up lolly wrappers and tissues left on park tracks and the shoreline. Like Scott-Woods, these voluntary cleaners tend not to grizzle about their self-imposed cleaning task or even at the people who have left their garbage in paradise. They are just tidying up their patch so that when they pass through again the environment will be unspoiled.

Scott-Woods' patch is a delightful outlier of the Coromandel Forest Park where bush and beach lie in a particularly cosy juxtaposition.

There is a modest network of basic tracks radiating from the end of Waitaia Rd near Kuaotunu down to a series of small bays that form a north-western fringe to Mercury Bay.

The tracks may be fairly crude, but choosing a route is helped by an extensive trapping programme for stoats and ferrets that slaughter kiwi and other native bird chicks. The traps are baited with eggs and regularly checked. To keep track of them, the traplines have been signposted with numbers.

Scott-Woods takes me down line 78 to Horseshoe Bay, which is so perfectly named it is inconceivable that this dent in the coastline could have been called anything else.

It is an entrancing shoreline gem that leads you to imagine you are the first person to set foot there and no one else will ever discover its secret location. Sadly, that is not so. A large piece of plastic that some camper used as a groundsheet lies among the flax bushes. On the beach are plastic milk bottles and the ubiquitous blue plastic straps that commercial fishers chuck overboard every time they open a new box of bait.

Scott-Woods collects the debris and bundles it out of sight under a rock above high tide mark. He'll come back for it on one of his morning runs. When he finds paper and other picnic debris burnables, he will collect them together on the shoreline near the water's edge and put a match to them.

We climb back into the regenerating native forest and down to Sandy Bay, which also lives up to its name and collects its share of rubbish.

Much of the debris has obviously come from boaties who have arrived by runabout for a secluded barbecue and picnic and then left behind beer bottles, tin foil, plastic plates and stinking mussel shells to taint paradise for the next visitor.

Scott-Woods does his clean-up again. It is much the same when we walk on to Matapaua Bay. From here we follow a road back to Opito Bay, but one day we may be able to walk around the coast to Humbug Bay, Red Bay and Crayfish Bay and back to Opito Bay without fear of trespassing on private land.

There is 48.5ha of Crown land on this coastal fringe and Scott-Woods and a group of other Coromandel walkway enthusiasts, which includes Pauanui and Whitianga canal developer Denis Hopper, are lobbying for the creation of a sanctioned shoreline walkway.

Of one thing you can be certain: if their dreams come to fruition the walkway will be kept clean.

* colinmoore@xtra.co.nz