A tyreroa goes ta-ta

Gone, it seems, are the days when Southlanders descended in their thousands on Oreti Beach, digging by hand, sometimes up to their shoulders, to pull out toheroa.

Now the famed shellfish is extracted just occasionally and in modest quantity under more traditional kai moana criteria, for special occasions.

Something akin to a supersized toheroa dig happened during the Protect Oreti Beach project now under way.

Call it a tyreroa dig, to extract just the one, but mightily big and weightily embedded tyre, possibly from a loader rather than a tractor. Not such good eating, admittedly, but unquestionably worth fishing out of there.

Fittingly, the group of beach-cleaners whose attention it drew happened to be four-wheel-drive enthusiasts - the Southland Land-Rover Club and their Southern Trailblazers mates.

They had shown up on beach-cleaning endeavours, partly because they regarded the project as inherently worthwhile, but also mindful of the bad attention that undisciplined and unaffiliated 4WD drivers had been attracting, damagingly tearing up and down the coast.

"Not all 4WD drivers are bad guys," says Southland club member Eileen Harrison.

"You can have challenges in the 4WD world that are positive. And we love challenges."

This here tyre, in the moment, seemed to qualify. The 4WDrivers did have other tasks at hand, and the obvious solution seemed to be to record the location and let GPS and some other outfit worry about it.

But the thought of calling backup didn't appeal, challenge-wise. It's not as if they didn't have a winch. And how hard could it be?

Yes, well ...

It took a bit of doing. Quite a lot of doing, actually.

But the beach is now short one unwanted tyre and the club members have moved on to a bunch of more exhilarating challenges.

And if the rest of a front-end loader is down somewhere, well it might just be a case of who gets to it first.

- © Fairfax NZ News