Golden Bay Search and Rescue’s 50th celebration a nostalgic treat
Search and Rescue veterans cut the 50th anniversary cake. From left, Monty Walker, Brian Reilly, Ken Pomeroy, Frank Soper, John Pomeroy (most recent SAR member), Brian McKay, Nobby Clark, Graeme Beardmore, Alan Pomeroy.
Around 140 people turned up last Saturday afternoon to help celebrate 50 years of Search and Rescue (now LandSAR) in Golden Bay.
Top-brass police officials from Nelson, foundation members of the organisation and their descendants, current stalwarts, the youngest teenage members and supportive family all mingled at the Takaka Primary School hall, and made the event a memorable occasion.
Near-vintage search equipment on display included a base set and hefty backpack radios, rusty lanterns, canvas packs, antiquated torches, and one carry spotlight with a mini-petrol generator attached. These contrasted with the modern equipment on show, including GPS and satellite communication devices such as the SARSAT field-centre internet, one of only two in the country, which is being trialled by Golden Bay LandSAR.
“There’s been some big changes over the years,” said local chairperson Graham Pomeroy. “Where once we would put huge teams of searchers out there, now we utilise more concentrated teams of three and four. The management is much bigger, which may seem silly to some, but it’s actually more efficient with modern communications keeping everyone in touch and feeding in information as it comes to hand. Training and profiling is much more specialised too, so we don’t waste our time looking in unlikely places. The courses we go on are more specialised too, like tracking. Gone are the days we go out looking only for lost trampers and overdue hunters; now we are trained in looking for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients, despondent and suicide-inclined runaways. This can involve urban or night searches. Once we only searched locally, but now we can get called on for the bigger searches as far south as Haast and across to Kaikoura.”
On a big board, the honours list of all the Bay locals who had participated over the years totalled 256. Many of those earliest veterans present on Saturday were called up to cut the cake, along with the latest member to join, 18-year-old John Pomeroy of Bainham.
Stories and reminiscences flowed thick and fast. Ivan Riley recalled the massive search he joined in March 1972 for 23-year-old American Roselyn Tilbury, who disappeared while walking the Heaphy Track with her flute-playing American boyfriend. “We searched everywhere, even the Aorere all the way down to Collingwood. No trace of her was ever found. It was a complete mystery.” Afterwards, many of her searchers suspected something fishy had gone on, and that she may have sneaked out of the country.
Former Takaka Constable Tony Cunningham got up to recall the day they found Peter Le Fleming after he had been lost for 29 days off the Heaphy Track in early 1980.
“I’d virtually given up hope for him, but my commander in Nelson urged me to have one last helicopter search. Trevor Solly and I flew from East Takaka up the Anatoki then came down the Burgoo, thinking I’d save the taxpayer some flight time rather than fly back around the coast. That’s where we spotted him, after just 15 minutes of flying time, lying on a rock.” The man had survived on ferns and roots and a dead fish he’d found on the riverbank, losing one third of his bodyweight in the process.
More recent stories included that of 52-year-old American professor Kenneth Bock, who went missing in the Abel Tasman National Park in May 2007. Mistaking possum poo for bear droppings, he’d kept up a great pace to evade the bears but eluded searchers as well. Just a month later came the dramatic rescue of Motueka doctor and caver Mike Brewer, who, because of his horrific thigh injuries, had to be inched out from under Mt Arthur in a 31-hour drama that unfolded on national television.
Many eyes were glued to the archive of clippings recalling past searches, which covered more boards around the walls. The earliest praised the first use of a radio transmitter and said how easy it had made things.
Merv Solly picked up a posthumous award for his father Trevor Solly, who was acknowledged for services to SAR for over 30 years, from its local inception in 1959. Trevor had participated in local searches well before that time as well. On display was his Search and Rescue diary from 1976 to 1982, which revealed near-monthly callouts, many of them multi-day. After finding Peter Le Fleming alive, he wrote a brief four-line entry, ending: “Successful aye”. The retrieval of drowned trampers topped his list, but he also answered the odd gracious call-out, such as “assist lady to cross Browns River”.
LandSAR’s national beginnings go back to when four trampers went missing in the Tararuas in 1933. Twenty teams of searchers took two weeks to find them alive, and as a result, Federated Mountain Clubs (FMC) and police drew up national rules for organising land searches. It wasn’t until the 1990s that LandSAR became a stand-alone body with its own base at national police headquarters. Today there are 54 local LandSAR organisations throughout New Zealand, totalling 2,500 members. Golden Bay LandSAR has 30 members.
Fritz van Rooden, the South Island Field Support Officer for LandSAR, acknowledged the “less visible people” in the organisation (the families), who fully support all the volunteer time their partners and/or parents put in, and who were well represented at Saturday’s event.
Wouter de Maat, who has been a volunteer for 30 years, 20 of them in the Bay, said the celebration had been a most moving event.
“It’s the first time we’ve had anything like this acknowledging all the local effort that has gone into the organisation. That’s why we got such a good turnout. It was an appropriate time to say well done and thank you everyone.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
