Driving through to Gisborne from Opotiki, several concerning things came to our attention. The first was a loaded log truck heading away from the Port of Gisborne and towards the Port of Tauranga. Apparently high port costs coupled with bad weather at the port – something loggers in this area have struggled with for years – make that extra 130km from Matawai worth it. The other concerning thing was the height of flood debris on the fences before Te Karaka.
On the highway the flood waters have obviously been well above the roof of our 4WD D-Max, and then near the turn off to Mangatu Forest there are signs of the flood water being around seven metres deep – a colossal and dangerous, amount of water. Many bridges are still out, and many roads are still either unpassable to log trucks or are barely more than goat tracks, so they are slow and expensive to cart logs on.
With costs so high and the earning window restricted by the weather, Gisborne-based crews like A & R Logging are looking to new technologies like the Falcon 2-speed winch to make their operations faster, more resilient and more efficient.
Falcon’s Winch Assist 2-speed Project Manager, Shaun Mills, says the concept was very much customer-driven at the instigation of another Gisborne logger, Blake Speirs: “We collaborated with Blake and Tigercat on this development and Blake has pretty much been running this skidder set-up since about 2018.”
Presumably as a result of this collaboration, Tigercat went ahead and made front-facing winch mounts and tether holes in the blade as factory standard. So that tells you they saw the writing on the wall. Thinking about clearing of possible driftwood from creeks, the skidder on a tether probably has quite a lot of potential too.
Blake was not available to talk – and given the atrocious state of Gisborne infrastructure, it’s not surprising that he is short of time – but our new Iron Tester for Gisborne, Tony Hill says Blake has “a massive tethering operation going on” a little further north of A & R Logging’s operation.
Logging’s in the blood
Logging wasn’t the first plan in life for Arana Kuru of A & R Logging. Although he did a bit of it in his teens because a lot of his family were into it (Dad, Jack and brother Ricky), Arana went off to Europe for 10 years – a few of those spent filleting and packing fish and doing ground work for property developers, among other adventures, before returning to New Zealand. He studied civil engineering project management and then went to work in that field in Auckland.
“I soon figured out that Auckland was a place I never wanted to raise my kids. I hated Auckland,” Arana says. “ I was prowling around looking for something different when I heard a crew was for sale back home here in Gizzy. Me and Dad went and saw Bob Rye of Rye Logging, the crew owner, and I got finance from UDC....
