My Account
Behind his trademark beard, which he has not trimmed for 40 years, Jo Evans is a man of catholic tastes and talents. Resident computer and electronics expert at the Leigh Marine Lab, he is also an accomplished flautist and singer, with a keen interest in theatre. A volunteer in the Leigh fire brigade for 24 years, Jo is a city boy who has adapted well to country life …
I came here originally as a student to the lab about 1968. I was doing my masters in physics at the University of Auckland and my project was to do with underwater sound. We were just beginning to get interested in sound transmission in water so my old professor sent me up here to help with some experiments.
As I had joined the Auckland Underwater Club and trained as a diver when I was still at school this was an opportunity to do an activity I enjoyed and work on an interesting project.
The University offered me a position as electronics technician in 1972. I was supposed to write up the work for my thesis in my spare time. But I came to live in the village of Leigh and after about a month Jack Garner of the Leigh General Store suggested I join the fire brigade. Also I found theatre people living here whom I knew from the time when I used to play in the pit orchestra at the Mercury Theatre and so I got involved in Warkworth Theatre Group productions.
I made friends with musicians in Puhoi and started playing chamber music with them. We contributed to the Rodney Music Club concerts (now the Warkworth Music Society) in its early days when it was just developing and I served several terms as President. So with all that going on, I found I didn’t have much spare time and the thesis never got written up.
I was a city boy. I grew up in Mt Albert and enjoyed what the city had to offer in the way of culture. I didn’t know if I’d take to living in the country. Joining the fire brigade was one of the best things I did because I got to know people. I often felt inexperienced in country matters but they educated me. The annual fireman’s ball (a rather grandiose name for a country dance) in those days was quite an important event in the community. Those kinds of things had disappeared from suburban Auckland so that was a new thing for me. The brigade was quite young and had an old hand-me-down Ford fire engine which was a bit temperamental. I remember once having to push it out of the shed it shared with the Gubbs bus and luckily the fire was downhill so we could clutch start it. I retired from the fire brigade 12 years ago.
When I first came to live in Leigh we had two stores, the general store on the corner and the top shop dairy which had its own petrol pump. There were pumps at Des Walker’s garage and also at the Whangateau store. There was a bus to Auckland and back every day of the week, and on Monday, Wednesday and Friday there were two buses. It was a wonderful service because you could order goods from Warkworth and they would come out on the bus that day. A lot of girlfriends and boyfriends of students used to rely on the bus service to spend the weekend in Leigh. My girlfriend, who became my wife, was one of those.
Over the last few years I’ve got back into doing electronics again as I used to when I first started at the lab. In the early days I largely supported physics projects but in the mid ‘70s oil was discovered in Taranaki and suddenly there was a lot of money available for projects so the physics department shifted their research focus to Taranaki. I didn’t mind because I was using my electronics and physics background to build apparatus for biologists.
One of the best things about working in the lab has been the association with biologists. At school I chose the so-called hard sciences and it wasn’t until I started diving with biologists like Roger Grace, who was a student with me at the time, that I realised how ignorant I was about biology. I enjoy contributing to their work and have learnt so much from them.
We bought our first computer – an Apple 2e – about 1981 and since then I’ve been responsible for developing the computer facilities here. In the last few years computers have got a lot more reliable and I’m able to do more electronics work for instance building a control system for an underwater video camera to use in quite deep water at the back of Great Barrier; we will be able to steer the camera, turn lights on and off and so on.
We’re also looking at crab larvae as part of a study of how marine larvae find their way back to reef areas to develop to the next stage. One theory is that they use the sound from the reef area – waves breaking, snapping shrimps or sea urchins whose shells ring like a bell when feeding at dusk. So I’m building a device for measuring the presence of larvae at either end of a tube to see if they’re attracted to the end closest to an underwater loudspeaker playing reef sounds.
I run the climate monitoring programme that Bill Ballantine set up in 1967. In the summer of 1982-83 the Pacific experienced an exceptional El Nino event. It was the summer that never was with very cold seawater temperatures. Scientists all over the world got interested in the phenomenon of the Southern Oscillation, the El Nino and La Nina cycle. By that stage we had 15 years of data and could show that sea surface temperature, wind direction, wave action and rainfall all correlated quite strongly with the Southern Oscillation. So we now know that in La Nina we get onshore events, tropical cyclones, more rain in heavy events, and warmer seas. With El Nino cold offshore winds dominate and we tend to get quite a few rain days but not so much rain. About 10 years ago I automated nearly all the measurements so we now record wind speed and direction, air temperature, humidity, solar radiation and rainfall continuously with averages every 10 minutes. We share the data with NIWA. The only one I haven’t been able to automate is sea surface temperature so I go down every morning with a thermometer and a bucket – it’s low-tech but still the most reliable.
My family is a very important part of my life. My wife, Susan Gibbings, has been a teacher at Leigh School for 13 years and is the longest-serving teacher there. She was still at university in Australia when I met her but we corresponded for about two years until she finished her Geology degree and decided New Zealand was where she wanted to be. I’m so pleased that we’ve been able to raise our three daughters in the relative isolation of Leigh to become successful, caring enthusiastic young adults. They are all bright girls and we could have sent them to a classy city school to take advantage of the greater resources there. Instead they’ve had some excellent teaching locally, both at school and in private music and dance tuition and I believe they have gained enormously from knocking around with the broad range of people you get in the country. They seem to have survived their teenage years without feeling too deprived and proudly wear T-shirts they designed which sport the legend, in rather small print across the chest, “I come from a small rural community”.
