Muriwai Beach In Spring

I have always thought Muriwai Beach is most beautiful in spring. This is when all the birds are singing and building their nests, the coastal plants are flowering, its still a little too cold for day visitors to consider driving out to populate it, and the sea air is crisp and clean. The sun is warm, and if you time it right (usually between spring squalls), you can be the only person out walking. 

Muriwai is where I grew up. I spent the first 20 years of my life truely getting to know its every corner and as such, despite having moved on, it is still home. 

Muriwai is a wild, long black sand beach North West of Auckland, that offers a range of outdoor activities. As such it is often very popular, with pockets teaming with people through the warmer months. Each year, a mishmash of surfers, swimmers, dog walkers, mountain bikers, fishermen, bird watchers and horse-riders stream to the beach and the surrounding area. As such the beach is often used in promotional videos of West Auckland and is popular with tourists.

At its most northern end, near the Kaipara Harbour entrance is an army base with no public access. Information about this base is posted at the access point for cars around 3 km up the beach from the village, where a little flag used to denote whether they were bombing. I used to watch the Hercules fly out over the Tasman from Whenuapai and return again, it is a loud, slow, low flying plane.

Along its coast, and behind the dune, the once wetlands have been converted to the Woodhill pine forest. Signs that state, No Trespassing are now posted periodically all along the way, courtesy of the new H&S act. At some points the pines are being consumed by huge dunes of sand as the prevailing westerlies drive them further into the land. Nature is fighting back against these mono-crop plantations. 

Muriwai Village is at the southernmost end of the beach. Its a small town, with two main shops, known by most as the Top Shop and the Bottom Shop. The Top Shop is so called, as it is located at an elevation higher than the Bottom Shop. It also has a very popular golf course, but I have never played, which perimeter edge offers a less known sheltered ambling walkway in a hollow between the course and the dunes.  The golf course loses a little bit of land every year to those dunes. 

There is public tennis court, skate park, volunteers fire brigade, information centre with voice recordings from the early 1990s, a children playground, BBQ and picnic areas, a surfboard hire place, a fish weighing station, two popular surf beaches side by side, and an expansive Australasian gannet colony. 

Now Gannets. 

It is difficult to deny that gannets are extraordinary birds. They are migratory and those that are able, spend there winters in the warmer climates of Australia. However, growing up in a place where you see gannets every year can cause you to become rather complacent about their presence. I have watched the colony expand and grow. Rigorous trapping programs have decreased the impact of predation. There are three constructed lookout posts to watch these birds as the glide on the updrafts. One of which, now, with the perfect wind direction can have you standing eye level, barely 2 metres away from the birds as they glide into their nests. It is also the spot where the white fronted terns used to nest. 

I find myself more and more fascinated now by the white fronted terns. The swallows of the sea. These little birds, tiny in comparison to the much larger gannets, nest in the little ledges on the edges of the mainland colony and are periodically displaced as the gannets expand their nesting sites every year. They dip and dive carrying whole fish in their beaks back to their nests, and collect tufts of nesting material. 

In other areas around Muriwai I have seen, Skylark, Swallows, Kereru, Fantails, Silver-eyes, House Sparrow, Dunnock, Chaffinch, Southern Black Backed Gull, Red Billed Gull, Black Billed Gull, Bellbird, Kakareke, Red Crested Parakeet, Tui, Song Thrush, Plover, Magpie, White Faced Heron, Oyster Catchers, Shags, Canada Geese, California Quail, Brown Quail, Paradise Shelduck, Australasian Bittern and New Zealand Pippits. The rivers are teaming with the common eel, and other small fish, and the rockpools, when the tide is truely low are filled with rock crab, starfish, anemones, octopus, hermit crabs, sand crabs, and one time a dog shark, and many many other creatures of sealife. There are glow worms on sheltered river banks if you know where to look, wolfspiders, and the native katipo spider, skinks and geckos, all manner of insects and other wildlife including introduced species of deer and rabbits, hedgehogs and possums, stoats, rats and field mice. (At least there are the ones that I have seen)

The geology of the area is equally fascinating, as is its history. In the back of the Top shop there used to be photographs of how the coastline used to look from the 1900s onwards. West Coast beaches are in constant flux, their coastline is constantly evolving with humans reclaiming land, and the ocean eroding it away again, and humans and ocean are in constant battle. There are no seafront properties here. The closest one, the old surf life saving club and community hall no longer exists at all, with the dunes now halfway through where the old building stood. As a child there was a third carpark now completely lost to the sea. Sometimes you can drive off the rocks at the end of the beach, at other times there is a 2 metre drop down as the sand is moved around creating pools and banks. 

Maori Bay - which now also known as Maukatia Bay as I often forget, is a deep circular bay on the other side of the gannet colony. It is very popular with surfers and is a powerful beach break with strong rips and currents. The water has a tendency to look beige and churned up. Sometimes the surf is good. The beach drops off sharply into what was the crater of an old volcano. The outline of which you can see from the island out at sea to the back of the carpark and around to Gannet rock. There are caves explorable at low tide at its northern end, from old lava flow. Around the 1950s what is now the car park, was a mine for road gravel. The outcome of this mining has left some spectacular cross sections of pillow lava on display. 

Rocks, currents, a plunging depth makes this a particularly hazardous place to swim unless you really know what you are doing. There are seals, there are sharks and there are exceptionally strong tidal currents. (enough to transport you a good kilometre out and three kilometres up the beach. It is also the location of one of New Zealand's most recent shark attacks which rocked the local community. 

There were rules for swimming when growing up at Muriwai (even for the slightly more predictable conditions posed by Muriwai Beach)

Always swim with some form of bodyboard or surfboard for floatation 

Don’t Panic!

If you get taken out by the tide, paddle with it, and then try to catch a wave in. 

These things are engrained into you if your Dad is a surfer. 

I was never so daring to go out past my neck in anything but the smallest of surf at Muriwai. (Being short. This is probably an average persons chest height). 

Muriwai Beach, is long. Very long. If you stand at its southern end and look north as far as you can you wont see the end of it. What you will see is the whole landscape simply melt into a haze of green black blue and grey and sky. The same sort of experience can be achieved at one of the now less used lookouts halfway up the valley looking down over the popular carpark, bottom shop and golf-course. They track ambles through native bush, typical of the Auckland west coast, subtropical plants that grow densely together, creating their own microclimate. Here there be glowworms if you know where and when to look along the river banks and damp ditches. 

Drive up coast road a bit and you will come to a point you can go no more. Here there is a river, popular with dog walkers, teeming with eels, now accompanied with No Trespassing signs. These were the walks of my childhood.