When Dan Mouatt first got into logging it was just supposed to be for a few weeks on his brother’s crew. He was given a pair of Canadian climbing spikes and sent up a bunch of old crop pines to rope them up so they could be pulled back.
“I struggled to walk for a few days after that,” he says with a smile.
That sort of all-in attitude has taken him far as he now runs two crews and his brother works for him.
“Revenge is sweet,” he jokes but it is clear he holds his brother in high regard as he is running the first and only operating Tigercat 180 swing yarder in New Zealand, which we are here to test today south of Wairoa.
When we drive up to the container for sign-in we can see the 180 is about 150 metres away in the cutover on a two-staging operation and it doesn’t look that big but at 409 horsepower it is up there between the two Log Champ yarders and is definitely more of a purpose-built yarder than a yoder. It has the manoeuvrability and more straightforward design of the latter though. And when we get up next to it there is definitely a surprise as to how big it is, how smoothly it is running and how stable it is as it fishes logs out of the gully below us.
The Iron Test team has been champing at the bit to get a look at this machine for quite some time but the stars hadn’t really aligned due to various issues and on Test Day we endured a few trees blown over across the river from us in a squall along with an associated downpour. That was no problem for Iron Tester, John Reid, though as he was tucked up inside admiring the superiority of Tigercat’s out-the-gate window wipers. But more on that later.
The Bay Forest Harvesting (BFH) story began a few years after Dan’s tree climbing “few weeks” that turned into six years’ logging in Taupo, Otorohanga and Remutaka – the latter two being Dan’s introduction to haulers.
“My father logged back in the day in Taupo and Northland too,” Dan says.
There was a brief stint with Wayne Lowe and then logging stems with Ribbonwood in Kaingaroa, he says: “That was an education. I did three years there back in the early days of stems, then it was off to Australia for something different but I ended up logging there too. All dead flat ground around Mount Gambier. Boring terrain really. When I got back here the Hawke’s Bay hills looked like mountains.
“My old employers at Ribbonwood, Kevin and Leigh Goodman, offered me a job in Hawke’s Bay. I ended up going into a share basis with them as Ribbonwood did back in the day and eventually I bought the whole crew. We had a Bellis 70 yarder in Willow Flat and went from there to form BFH.”
A rocky start
BFH went woodlot logging for a bit...
Gallery
