WHITEBAIT CAMP AT BIG BAY: FOOD SUPPLIES RUN SHORT

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 October 1947, Page 3

WHITEBAIT CAMP AT BIG BAY: FOOD SUPPLIES RUN SHORT

DUNEDIN, October 11. Almost out of food, three young men from Christchurch who have set up a whitebait camp at Big Bay, bn the West Coast, gave a hearty welcome to a Tiger Moth of the Otago Aero Club yesterday when it landed there, bringing them provisions. Since the mishap to the Auster aircraft a week before, they had been out of touch with the outside world. The nearest telephone is 58 miles away over some of the roughest country in New Zealand.

“As soon as I had touched down on the beach, the three of them came running along the sand waving cigarette papers over their heads like flags of truce,” said Mr R. G. Bush, the Otago Aero Club instructor, who flew the load of supplies. “They were frantic to know whether I had anything to go with the papers, as they had been out of cigarettes for a week and had been smoking coffee.” Tobacco was included in the supplies flown in to the camp by Mr Bush. The men were heartily sick of the look of whitebait, said Mr Bush. Their traps had been full for days from the two streams running into Big Bay, but there had been no way of getting the fish out. With their own supplies running low, they had been eating a certain amount of it, but they had stopped laying their nets in the meantime. The men had been without meat for a week, and they had finally managed to shoot a deer. The men were taken in to their camp by' .air, the beach at Big Bay offering an excellent one-way landing strip at low tide. They have been living in an old log cabin.