This Site is dedicated to all those families of the people that have tragically disappeared on flights in and around New Zealand. I only hope that from all the effort in building this site and from all the effort of those taking part in this venture, that it will bear fruit in bringing ‘closure’ to their memories!
Gavin Grimmer
On Saturday 11th April 2015, many family members (two from Australia) showed up at
Blair’s place, along with the Adventurer Scouts and their Leaders, and LandSAR led
by Jono Hattrell. Unfortunately a lot of LandSAR members didn’t make it, but LandSAR
was very gracious in supplying hi-viz vests (lots of them) and radios. Between us,
we split into two groups - those that were keen to tackle the rugged search areas,
and the other for the ‘easier going’ area. Les and I took 11 people into the ‘easier’
area down on the flatland, whereas the rest went to the search areas 2 and 3.
Areas 2 and 3 were covered by 5 teams consisting of at least 3 people per team. Unfortunately
they only had 3 GPS’s between them but in Jono’s words, “Only 3 teams had GPS units
that I could download information from. I made sure that these teams bookended the
search areas, so a further 2 teams searched the areas between the tracks you can
see. Obviously, I can't tell how good the coverage was!
Each GPS unit was carried by the team leader - each team leader had at least two
searchers with him/her (i.e. at least one on each side)”. 
When you allow for the further two teams without a GPS to record their tracks, I
would say they searched the area pretty good. The lines shown along the bottom of
these search areas are along the “Monro Track” that goes from the Resort down to
the next beach north of Moeraki Beach - (Monroe Beach). If you watched the TV3 “Campbell
Live” programmes you will know we were rained out the following day (Sunday 12th)
so a lot of the family members were rather disappointed at that, but at least they
got the feel of the difficulties involved in searching this bush. All in all, when
you look at all the areas covered so far, I think we have done a pretty good job
of it but there is still a lot of area to cover.
This image above is all the GPS tracks of the areas searched NNW of the Moeraki River
in 2015 (minus the straight lines)
This shows the GPS tracks for the areas 1 - 5, plus the 2013 GPS tracks (in white)
of the searches at that time.
