The terrain that Sharples Logging encounters in Canterbury is particularly challenging, with volcanic rock so hard that it snaps grousers off and will send a machine skating if you go over it in the same place more than once without a tether.
With many Canterbury forests sharing a boundary with farms there are also many more fences and edge trees to contend with than in larger plantations.
It was with this in mind that Dave Sharples and his wife Jill eyed up John Deere’s new 959ML with factory fitted John Deere FL100 felling and shovelling head. With dual tilt rams and dual rotator motors on it, this felling head is surprisingly tough and gets busy tilting whole stems on angles we are not used to seeing.
When the Iron Test team arrived regular JD959ML operator, Carl Erceg, was busy gripping the heads of two big edge trees and pushing them up a ridge while Sharples skidder operator, Royce Sheffield, had the butts in the grapple of the JD848L skidder.
It’s a beautiful thing to see two skilled operators working in concerted effort to make the job succeed.
Down at the skid, the crew owner, Dave, is loading the twelfth truck for the day, having risen at 3.15am to drive here, about an hour and 20 minutes from his home in Rangiora to this logging operation in Little River on Banks Peninsula.
The block is 60 hectares of moderate to steep ground. The Sharples crew has logged about half of it this autumn and is about to leave as winter sets in but will return to complete the rest next summer.
Starting out in the forest service
Dave started out working for the NZ Forest Service (NZFS) based in Nelson where he was trade qualified as a builder and built and maintained houses and huts in the 33,000 hectare Golden Downs exotic forest as well as in native forest parks and reserves.
“North West Nelson was our Conservancy, basically from Westport through to Kaikoura and up to Farewell Spit,” says Dave. “I would walk the Heaphy Track (82kms) every year to do maintenance and expansion projects there.”
Being keen on rugby, Dave soon joined the NZFS rugby team and played in many tournaments around the country but one issue that arose was the cost to travel to these games. He and his teammates took on part-time jobs in logging crews and doing silviculture work in Golden Downs Forest and then eventually logging became a full time career.
Moving south and going ground-based
Dave moved south out of Nelson to Canterbury for a three-year contract and has pretty much been here ever since. There are around 100,000 hectares of exotic forests in Canterbury, 15% of it Douglas fir and 75% pine. About 70% of the total forest area is traditionally harvested by ground based crews so Dave was servicing the smaller sector with a yarder.
In 1996 Dave flew to Canada and bought a Skagit GT3 swing yarder and a bulldozer...
