Omar David Garcia Hoyos passed away nine years ago, and every year since then his family and friends have been remembering and celebrating his life with volunteer days at CUE Haven. Omar’s siblings, Vanessa and Hernan organized yet another wonderful volunteer group on Saturday.

Friends and family on site today included Omar’s family members Alba, Omar, Vanessa, Hernan and Emi as well as friends Alana, Alex, Henry, Jake, Leonard, and Tabitha, and our friends and volunteers Izzy and Jake.

Everyone started arriving around 9.30 and caught up over morning tea. Mahrukh then welcomed everyone and gave an update on developments at CUE Haven.  Thomas then gave a description of the activities planned for the day and a safety briefing.

The plan for the day was to do some autumn maintenance.  We broke into three teams.

Alba, Emi, Omar and Vanessa worked on trimming vegetation that had grown over the roads and boardwalk over the summer.

The second team worked on getting the drains on the main road at CUE Haven, Huarahi Kowhai, ready for winter.  The road has a system of drains and pipes to channel water away from the road surface and the drains get blocked with both vegetation and also dirt and rocks. We have to keep the drains and pipes clear and the team went to work with spades, rakes and at times even their hands!

We drove up to the top of the road and started from there.

At some points along the road there was also a lot of overhanging vegetation and the team trimmed it away.

Thanks to the team’s efforts the track is ready for winter and also looking great.

The third team tackled a number of very messy engineering tasks.

The boardwalk in the wetlands crosses the stream at two points and when the boardwalk was built in 2014, we constructed bridges over both those sections which enabled comfortable access over the stream and into the wetlands. After the heavy rain events we’ve had since 2023, silt coming down from landslips on the farm upstream clogged the area under the main bridge and as a result, the stream found a new course along the side of the boardwalk.  Aside from impacting the wetlands further downstream this also has the effect of undermining the boardwalk as the stream flows along the support structure.

Last year, a team did remediation work to raise the bridge so that water could flow more freely underneath it and there would be less chance of silt blocking the stream.

At that time, the team also dug out underneath the bridge and dug a channel to direct the water flow toward the downstream ponds and since then we’ve been working to keep the channel clear and free flowing.

Recent heavy rains have brought down more silt and impacted the drainage and the teams this year have been undertaking the challenge of clearing out the stream to improve the flow under the bridge and then extending out the channel further into the wetlands to help the water flow.

They went to work with rakes, spades and grubbers to widen and clear the stream channel.

Their hard work got the water flowing well under the bridge.  They then moved downstream to the other side of the bridge to widen and extend the channel in the wetlands.

They needed to cut back some of the vegetation in order to do the digging.

It was hard and messy work but the team quickly got the stream flowing rapidly down to the wetland ponds.

There was a smaller, similar issue with a drain leading from the high ground next to the shed.  Water flowing down after heavy rain overwhelmed the drain and resulted in water and silt flowing out onto the driveway.  The team cleared and extended the drainage ditch to fix the issue.

The last task the team handled was putting down a layer of mesh on a new boardwalk section another team had built.  The mesh protects the boardwalk and provides good traction in all weather.

The mesh comes in long, wide coils so the first task was to lay it out and cut it to size.

The mesh was moved into position and cut to size.

They then used staples to secure the mesh in place.

The weather throughout the morning was mixed with intermittent rain but all the teams bravely worked on cheerfully and finished up around the same time. Everyone then cleaned up and enjoyed a late lunch. After a relaxing lunch everyone took a walk to visit to visit the memorial tree planted for Omar and reminisce about him.

It was a great day of remembrance and fellowship.  We want to thank the Garcia Hoyos family for their friendship and continued support of CUE Haven and for organising the day and for again bringing their amazing friends to help out.

And a BIG thank you to everyone for giving up your Saturday morning and coming out to help. You have all made a major contribution to CUE Haven. It is always great seeing old friends and we really appreciate all your hard work and continued support.  And as always, we enjoyed the many interesting conversations. We very much look forward to seeing you all again soon.

THANK YOU!! THANK YOU!