Piha Beach

This guide to Piha Beach in Auckland opens in 1934, when five members of the Waitemata Rugby Club, unsettled by drownings on their unpatrolled stretch of black sand, decided to start a rescue club themselves, shipping in a surf boat all the way from Sydney. It traces the beach's volcanic origins, from the iron sand carried north from Mount Taranaki to Lion Rock, the ancient volcanic neck the Maori named Te Piha and once fortified as a village. Look south toward the rock as you listen, and watch how the surf splits around it.