22 August 2024
Big Dreams at Blue Duck
Kei Te Koraha. Off the Beaten Track.
writer: Elise Cacace
photographer: Michelle Porter
Sandy Waters remembers a time when the farm life she and her husband, Dan Steele, are now living was still a dream. As their kids grow up, wild and free amidst the lush native bush of Ruapēhu at Blue Duck Station, Sandy and Dan welcome visitors to experience their piece of paradise.
After years of living the corporate grind, Sandy knew it was time to leave the city and find her calling. “I’ve always worked in tourism and knew that I wanted to start my own business someday, I just never knew what exactly it would be,” says Sandy. As it turns out, her calling was the old nurses home in Raetihi in the North Island’s Ruapēhu District. She laughs as she remembers the looks on her friends’ faces – “They all thought I had lost my mind!” – when she announced her plans to turn it into a boutique accommodation and events venue.
Top Image. The historic depot building was built in 1917 to provide a delivery depot for supplies coming off the Whanganui River boats for the returned serviceman who were farming on balloted blocks at the back of the station. The depot is located just off the Kaiwhakauka Track, which runs next the Kaiwhakauka River. It was built from hand-split native timber, and still has its original corrugated-iron roof.
“There was everything wrong with the place. It had an inch of moss growing over the roof, a foot of water in the basement, broken windows, threadbare carpet, no driveway, parking, hot water or heating. The previous owners had left the country, literally just walked away. Their clothes were still in the drawers, bread and butter still on the kitchen bench. It was a big mess,” Sandy recalls.
It was in Raetihi, fifteen years ago, that Sandy met her now-husband, Dan. “I’d organised this meeting with local business owners to talk about promoting our region, and Dan from Blue Duck Lodge turned up. He was about forty-five minutes late, ate all the food, didn’t contribute to the meeting whatsoever, and then at the end he was like, ‘Right, who wants to go to the pub?’ I thought, ‘Gah, who is this guy?’ But that was kind of how things started.
“As a kid, my parents always said I should have been raised on a farm because I was an avid animal collector. I’d find stray cats, homeless dogs, wild rabbits, malnourished goats and abandoned horses. Mum and Dad wouldn’t buy them for me, I would just acquire them somehow.”
Happily, Sandy, 43, and Dan, 51, have now been married for more than ten years and have four children – Blue, 13, Snow, 9, and twin boys Forest and River, 6. Together they manage a sprawling 2,800 hectare operation that includes Blue Duck Station, the neighbouring Retaruke Station, which they lease from Dan’s parents, and Sandy’s fully renovated and renamed nurse’s home, Snowy Waters Lodge.
“When I first moved here, everyone said, ‘You’re going to be so bored,’ but I have never been so busy,” Sandy says. “There is never any downtime, it’s always go, go, go. We either have guests here, or staff – or both – so it’s a really social atmosphere.” She recalls, “My first time at the farm, I wore these floral gumboots. The next day Dan came to my office with some Red Bands saying, ‘You cannot turn up wearing those floral things.’ That’s how much I didn’t know about farming!"
With all the hard work Sandy, Dan and the Steele family have put into making Blue Duck Station what it is, it’s only natural they would want to share their slice of paradise with visitors from across the world. Sandy often guides horse treks on their sneakily growing – “Don’t tell Dan!” – stable of twenty-five horses with her daughter, Snow. Dan and Blue take their guests hunting, and father-in-law Richard captains their jetboat business. To them, their station is one of the most beautiful places in the country, not only because of the lush green landscapes but also because of the community working together to protect and showcase it, and the freedom it provides their children.
“It’s great having family so close. My in-laws, Rachel and Richard, live only three kilometres up the road and, although they have stepped back from farming to allow us to step up, they still love to be involved, which is really nice. They also love looking after the kids, which is so helpful,” says Sandy, whose own parents live back in her hometown of Pāuanui. “We’re an hour from Taumarunui, so I do a town run once a week for supplies for our cafe and restaurant. We grow our own fruit and vegies, but I do partake in a bit of online shopping, as you can imagine. We try to share the town run around our team so that it’s not the same person all the time. It’s hard to make it a family outing, as Dan and I are often working weekends and if we were to go after school we’d be getting back very late. I’m hard and fast on family dinner at 5:30pm. Rachel looks after our chickens and supplies all the eggs for the Blue Duck Cafe, which is amazing because I’m not a very good chicken farmer. My chickens are too free range!”
Sandy woke one morning earlier this year to find one of her hens and seven baby chicks had been slaughtered by a feral cat overnight, reminding her of what these feral cats do to our native blue ducks, New Zealand bats and kiwi. “We’ve got all these feral cats and such fragile wildlife,” says Sandy. “In the very first lockdown, we trapped a cat a week for about seven weeks, and that wasn’t even us being super proactive. It’s a big job because it’s not flat countryside. We have around 450 traps and we can’t just ride a bike to each one– we’ve got to walk through bush, along ridgelines, and climb to 300 metres above sea level. Just one of our traplines will take you four hours to go through and reset.
Top left. Sandy with Star, one of two Northland bush ponies. Top right. Part of Sandy’s herd – the greys poking their heads out from behind Horatio are Star, Neigha and Comet. “Comet is the second horse I started. I got him as a foal out of the 2016 Kaimanawa wild horse muster. Snow has just started riding him and they recently attended a Wilson Sisters camp together. They were jumping eighty-five centimetres!” Above left. Horses Star, Banjo, Bandit, Outlaw and Angel on a trek. Above right. Snow and her pony, Angel, who will soon behanded down to Sandy’s niece, Isla. “The kids all have a pony each – or three in Snow’s case! They have to feed, groom and care for them, although it is becoming harder now that the twins are getting into motocross!
The Steele kids at the Retaruke sheep yards, near Granville House. This year, Blue started boarding school at St Paul’s in Hamilton; Snow and the twins attend Kaitieke School, a year 0–8 country school twenty kilometres west of National Park Village. They make of one third of the school roll. “We are very fortunate that our stock manager’s wife, Sophie, drives the school bus,” Sandy says. “These are working yards, but we repurposed them for one night in February 2014. We didn’t have enough room at our cafe for our wedding reception, so we pulled out the rails, cleaned out what sheep poo we could get to, then spread a load of sawdust to mask the smell!” Sandy remembers. “We used haybales for seating and ‘borrowed’ the chandeliers from my house to light it up. The cowboy boots were given to Snow as a gift by an American lady I met while I was backpacking through Africa with a girlfriend a few years ago. She travelled to New Zealand to join one of my multiday treks. My kids have friends of all ages and nationalities from all over the world!”
The efforts to protect endangered wildlife and reintroduce more native species, including the whio and kārearea, are bolstered by a strong community of volunteers who regularly contribute to maintaining and upgrading traps. “At the moment, we’re focusing on controlling predator numbers so the existing wildlife population can procreate, but in the future, it would be great to have more species reintroduced – like the pāteke. We’re doing everything we can to get to that point, and everything else – like tourism – is just a stepping stone to provide us with an income so we can put the money back into conservation,” Sandy says. “Raising kids here is just the best. They have ponies and motorbikes and pets and space to play outside, build tree huts and sand castles, explore the bush, plant trees, grow their own vegies, pick their own fruit and harvest their own honey. Being constantly surrounded by nature is so good for the soul and your mental health, and I love knowing that we’re building a legacy for them, and also for other people to enjoy. We’re creating these wetlands and a safe environment for species that were here long before us, and having that overall goal – leaving this place in a better position than it was when we arrived –gives me a purpose in life.”
Glossary. Kārearea, New Zealand falcon. Pāteke, blue teal. Whio, blue duck.
Sandy invited photographer Michelle Porter to join her on a multiday horse trek on Blue Duck Station to document this story.
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This story appeared in the Takurua Winter 2024 Edition of Shepherdess.
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