When Bay Forest Harvesting’s 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 our Iron Test team is testing this month, south of Wairoa.
Iron Test writer, Tim Benseman continues: “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 smooth 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 haven’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.
“The Bay Forest Harvesting 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.”
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