My Account
Warkworth vet Ross Lynch spent a good part of his youth sailing yachts around the Pacific and might still be at sea if not for the lying old captains in California who gave him a glimpse of a future he didn’t want. So he came ashore to settle, with his wife Laura, in “the nicest area in New Zealand”, where he joined the Rotary club and the brass band, and swapped sea breezes for the rush of riding an Indian motorbike.
I was born, raised and went to school in New Plymouth, and started sailing there. I used to hang out with one of the vets who lived just down the road from us and I guess that led to me becoming a vet. I used to holiday on farms. I went off to Palmerston North, to Massey, and got my vet qualification. In 1974 I started work for the Bay of Islands vet service in South Hokianga, which was a fairly remote area in those days. I was given a car with a boot full of lotions, potions and medicines, given a road map and pointed the way out of town. That was when the brucelosis eradication scheme was in full swing and every calf had to be vaccinated before it was three months old. I got to visit all the farmers in quick succession. It was a live vaccine and even a scratch from a contaminated needle would make you sick. I think in today’s OSH mindset you wouldn’t be allowed to use that vaccine, but it did the job and eradicated the disease.
The last thing I did in the Bay of Islands was a navigation course, then I hung out in Auckland for a couple of months looking for a crewing position. I shipped out as navigator on a 40-footer and went to the Cooks for two months, then on to Tahiti. I got on to a 32-footer that was heading back to Hawaii. It was a family boat and the son of the owner had set out on a big round-the-world trip but met with disaster at every stage because he wasn’t emotionally equipped. Within three days of getting to Hawaii he was on a plane home and I was supposed to deliver the boat to Marina del Rey (California). Before he left, he introduced me to a guy with a 1947 Hobart Racer built in Sydney, 55 feet long. For a couple of months I resisted the invitation to join the crew permanently – until I went sailing on it. We went from Honolulu to Lahaina and the boat performed so beautifully crossing the channels between the islands, I was hooked. So I found someone else to deliver the boat to the west coast and spent the next six years on the Hobart Racer.
I became skipper, engineer, navigator, doctor. I was in Hawaii about eight months that time, then we sailed to the Marquesas, worked our way west to Fiji, then down to New Zealand. From Hawaii to Whangarei took about a year. In Whangarei I supervised a major refit of the boat then delivered it to California, Newport Beach. I lived on it for the next 20 months while it was for sale and that was where I met Laura. We got married on board with a bunch of boats rafted alongside. The bridal vehicle was a little 27-footer that had sailed from Hawaii. We had a piano on board with a blind pianist, and the bar was a six-foot dinghy full of ice and beer. It was a great day.
I was having a wonderful time in California but at about 5 o’clock every day you could go into any bar along the waterfront and see the same people, in the same seats, telling the same lies. They called themselves captain but really they were just boat hands and they were going nowhere.
The boat sold and I delivered it to San Diego and a whort while later, mid 1982, we came back to New Zealand. We got the Model A Ford out of dad’s garage – it used to be a baker’s van – bought a campamatic and spent the next 10 months on the road. It’s actually a damn good way to see the country, because you’re going slowly and if people toot at you, you just make it backfire. The old A does a wonderful backfire. I’ve still got it; it hasn’t been registered since 1988 but I’m working on it.
We’d camped at Martins Bay for a few days and when we decided we wanted to buy a property before we went back overseas, we both nominated Warkworth as the nicest area we’d seen in our travels. We bought our section at Rainbows End then went to the US, then England, where I eased back into the veterinary business. I worked there for the best part of a year and couldn’t get out of England quick enough. It’s a wonderful museum, but who wants to live in a museum?
We came back to New Zealand in 1984 and I did 15 months as a locum at Wellsford. Then this practice came on the market so we bought it.
I’ve been bitten, kicked, scratched, and put the odd needle through bits of my anatomy inadvertently. Deer are probably as dangerous as any animal I’d deal with – they have the ability to strike, and when a skinny little foot comes at you at eye level, you don’t see it. Horses can be quite malicious. As far as dangerous dogs go, we have ways of dealing with them. You can get more badly bitten by a cat because they’re bloody quick and you don’t expect it – dogs give you some warning. I see a lot of native birds for DOC at no charge, but don’t want to be seen as a bird rescue centre.
I believe animals have a different attitude to pain. We’re conditioned to be afraid of pain, whereas animals aren’t. If a dog has a broken leg it thinks “that one doesn’t work too well but aren’t I lucky I’ve got three others to run around on”. They do have emotions – some pine when their owners aren’t there, others are nervous, but some just reflect their owners’ neuroses.
We’ve had a few clinic cats – Sparky, Sam, Jasmine, Pat the Cat and now Rags, short for Ragwort. She was born down behind New World and Julie Thompson brought her in on the day her eyes opened to see if she would be a survivor, and we had a vacancy for a cat because Pat the Cat had just been run over for the second time. They have their little fan clubs. Kids on the way home from school stop and talk to Rags through the window and security guards have been known to talk to the cats in the evening.
My other toy is an Indian motorbike that gave me an interesting experience once when it caught fire as I was coming down the last hill towards Warkworth. I looked down and saw big sheets of flame and I thought if I slow down they’ll engulf me, so I opened the throttle and turned off the petrol, and 100 yards on the motor cut out. After I re-earthed the battery, repaired a couple of melted wires and tightened the carburettor, I gave it two kicks and it was running all right, so I rode it back home. The paint is still blistered.
I enjoy working here. Sometimes the hours can be a bit rugged, but it’s a satisfying job. There are good people in this neck of the woods. Locums over the years have often commented on what a nice area it is, and nice clientele.
Being a nice area, people are normally happier in themselves than if they were jammed close together in the city. If you wake up in the morning to a halfway decent view and drive in thinking “this is a nice town to be in”, that’s got to make your day better.
