Abel Tasman National Park gets ministerial visit
Conservation Minister Kate Wilkinson took her first visit around the Abel Tasman National Park (ATNP) coastline last Friday, disembarking at Anchorage to be briefed on her department’s facilities at the eastern end of the beach there.
These include a 24-bunk hut alongside a campground with 30 campsites, and purpose-built kayak haul-out racks to minimise the visual pollution of boats lining the beach, particularly in summer.
The Department of Conservation’s new capital works programme at Anchorage will see the hut replaced in 2013.
The minister’s visit was originally scheduled a year ago. She was due to open Motueka’s Godwit Festival, but was involved in the response to the first Christchurch earthquake. Her trip last week was hosted by the Abel Tasman Birdsong Trust, a partnership between commercial operators, the community and DOC.
At 22,530ha, the ATNP is New Zealand’s smallest national park but its busiest, with nearly 200,000 annual day trippers and 58,055 bednights booked until August this year. Only 6,000 take on the Heaphy each year. In the ATNP, DOC operates four huts, together sleeping around 109 people, and 21 designated camping areas that collectively accommodate around 644 people, not including Totaranui, which has a capacity between 850 and 1,000.
The coastal boundary of the ATNP is set at mean high water mark, which means that the foreshore, including all beaches and estuaries, are actually outside the park and technically come under TDC jurisdiction. But negative publicity and concerns about overcrowding in the park five years ago led DOC to consult with stakeholders to limit visitor numbers along the coastal strip (defined as mean high water mark to 500m inland from Coast Track) by managing concessioned commercial activity at “a level that allows National Park values to be preserved”.
The Abel Tasman Foreshore Scenic Reserve Draft Management Plan was released last June and submissions closed on August 8. When approved, it will likely restrict drop-off access by commercial operators to seven coastal access points – concentrating people where there is infrastructure such as campsites, toilets or huts. Under the new regulations, water-taxi drop-offs at the private enclave of Torrent Bay (which has holiday-season residents) will be limited to 300 persons in total per day and kept to between 9am and noon (This is non-applicable to residents there).
Gerard Hindmarsh
