Student Profiles

Hi Mark, Sam Reweti here, just thought that I would drop a line to catch up.

Work up here in Whangarei is good, we have a five year work-plan in front of us and is very likely to double if Hancock's buy out Rayonier's Northland plantations. I am currently looking after two silviculture crews of 8 men, one thinning and one fertilisingand spraying. I have trained two crew leaders to run their own jobs so it would free me up to concentrate on health and safety,new blocks, training, etc.

I enjoy the challenges that this job provides and just recently my boss went to California to fight the wild fires over there for five weeks and in that time I had full Command over all operations including our fulltime workshop, which was a really good challenge. I had to deal with your friend Peter Houston and Ross Gee quite a bit in that time, negotiating block prices and timeframes for work as well as deploying our fire trucks to flush out the blocked drains and culverts, what a headache I can tell you.

Early in the new year we will be setting up another two silviculture crews to tackle our huge planting programme that we have in front of us 2500ha. so I will be very busy training and finding good crew leaders to get these crews along. I also assess all the guys for their forestry units and we are looking at moderation for my fire units as well.

I would like to say thank you very much to you and all the tutors that were involved within the Diploma for helping get to where I am today and if there is anything that I can do to help you guys just drop me a line and I will see what I can do.