It’s been years since we tested a machine on the Wet Coast. Yep, we spelt that wrong on purpose.
Hats off to blokes who log in this very challenging place. We roll into Greymouth the night before the test to be greeted by a terrible storm, with several hours of thunder and lightning and the sea sounding like it is going to crash over the road and through the wall of the cabin. Lucky we don’t scare easy.
We are here to test a Komatsu PC270HW – a long-legged, lean machine sporting an Ensign grapple with a few modifications so it’s ready to slide into the felling machine role a bit further down the track.
We turn off a respectable West Coast tar sealed road on to Mosquito Creek Rd. Those who have been on the coast will be instantly nervous seeing that bug’s name. The bridge before us is narrow and looks dubious. They cart logs over this?
“Oh yeah,” says Hayden McCulloch from Komatsu Forest as he accelerates and begins calling road markers on the RT.
The foothills of the Southern Alps is the basic location, and we cross the tiny bridge with a steep goat track barely wide enough for a log truck leading in to it and, sure enough there is a secondary creek crossing beside the bridge, because it is too light to handle big logging gear.
KEA Logging has been mostly in windthrow blocks for about 23 years down here. Owner Gavin Fisher says quite a few of the trees generally blow down at the 23 or 24 year old mark – a similar story to what we are hearing for some of the trees in the Nelson region – so it’s important to have some robust gear when dealing with this dangerous sector of the industry.
How it all began
Gavin started out in the industry in a pruning job straight out of school, but then went gold mining for 20 years, so had a solid grounding in machine operation before going into business with his brother Clayton, using an early Yoder-type machine in 2013.
“That didn’t really last long, and we actually just went shovel logging with one grapple digger for a while, and built ourselves up from there,” says Gavin. “Once I got into felling machines, I stayed in them mostly.”
He bought his brother out a couple of years ago, as Clayton wanted to retire. On site today there is plenty of nice, straight, modern gear being run by obviously skilled and careful operators. They’re producing about 230 tonnes a day, which is great going for a tight-knit four-man crew working in tough ground in a tough district. It’s not only the challenging windthrow, but the high rainfall, wide range of soil types, broken ground due to mining activity prior to planting – and those bugs. While we hardly saw any, it is fair to say that, on a bad day, they take a toll on one’s physical and psychological ability to work productively. It makes you super grateful...
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