All posts by OkaritoSandflyRepellent

Free App For NZ Sandflies

News, Okarito Sandfly Repellent

We have recently teamed up with Sandfly Map, a fantastic free app for NZ sandflies and other biting insects. This app, designed y the ultra-talented Finnian Anderson, allows users to see a sandfly density map, view individual reports of sandfly density and annoyance, and log their own sandfly reports. You don’t even need to be online to log a Report. This app is super helpful if you are into tramping, fishing, hiking, NZ travel or any time you are visiting the great outdoors.

Meet the App Designer

Finnian Anderson is an extremely talented young app designer based in Wanaka. Originally from the UK, he moved to New Zealand in 2017. He was subjected to a full on assault of sandfly bites while tramping the Milford Track, the most famous Great Walk in NZ. This introduction to New Zealand sandflies on his first foray into New Zealand’s great outdoors started a chain of events that resulted in him developing Sandfly Map.

Listen to Finnian being interviewed by Jesse Mulligan on RNZ by clicking here.

Okarito Sandfly Repellent Gets On Board

We already knew Finnian, and he was already a user of our natural, NZ made sandfly repellent. So we teamed up and he incorporated Okarito Sandfly Repellent into his app.  When users zoom into the sandfly density map, they will see our logo wherever our repellent is sold. Tap on the logo and it will bring up the name of the retailer, and a “Get Directions” button that will link to an online map.

Or, easier still, tap out logo at the top left of the map screen and it will immediately bring up the nearest retailer to your current location. And all this works while you are offline. Clever eh?

You can download Sandfly Map here.

Okarito Volunteer Conservation Gorsebusters Program 2022

Okarito Volunteer Conservation

News, Sustainability

We were recently involved in an Okarito volunteer conservation project called Gorsebusters that was driven by the desire to give back to our local environment by controlling invasive gorse on Okarito Lagoon, the largest natural wetland on the West Coast of NZ.

We are always looking at ways of enhancing sustainability and giving back to our environment. Many types of schemes exist such as carbon offsetting, sponsoring endangered species and tree planting. However we have been very wary of schemes that could appear to be greenwashing.

Kaitiaki

After looking at many different ways that Okarito Sandfly Repellent could give back to it’s environment, we decided that a kaitiaki approach seemed a lot more appealing. To act as guardians of our backyard, helping to protect it from threats through habitat restoration of the local environment we have worked and lived in – and lived off – for many years.

In 2021, Baz Hughes & Gemma van Beek, the new owners of our former business Okarito Kayaks had a great idea. The region’s tourism industry had been hit hard by Covid-19. There were a lot of bad news stories coming out of South Westland. For a number of years they had wanted to find a way to give back to Okarito Lagoon which lies within Westland National Park. They had looked at attempting to do some gorse bush removal from parts of the riparian margins of Okarito Lagoon. One problem – this was a huge job. Two or three people would hardly scratch the surface of the problem.

Okarito Gorsebusters is Born

So Okarito Gorsebusters was launched. It is a volunteer project where people would come from all over New Zealand and spend a week at Okarito helping to restore the ecosystem by cutting gorse from the lagoon. What would they get in return? Not much – free camping, food and evening entertainment. Baz thought maybe 12-20 people might be mad enough to sign up. But some great publicity on Seven Sharp and Jesse Mulligan on RNZ saw the phone run hot and more than 50 people signed up.

We teamed up with Baz and Gemma to assist in the organisation and running of the event, and provided Okarito Sandfly Repellent to all the volunteers.

The event was a roaring success – 19 km of lagoon shoreline was cleared of gorse.  An estimated 26000 gorse plants were cut and the stem pasted with a herbicide gel to prevent regrowth. The volunteers loved their time. Many immediately signed up to return the next year.

Keeping the Gorse Out

We all know that gorse grows back. Its seed is distributed by wind, water and animals. And gorse seed can remain dormant but viable in the soil for decades. We didn’t expect to instantly eradicate it. So Gorsebusters will be an ongoing thing. Once the “old man gorse” is removed (the largest trunk had a 400mm diameter!) we will do annual checks on regrowth to keep it under control.

 

How We Got Into Sandfly Repellent

News, Okarito Sandfly Repellent

We often get asked what prompted us to start making and selling Okarito Sandfly Repellent? The answer is, basically a whole series of accidents.

Our logo, created be Hannah Schickedanz in 2017

In 1999 we bought the business Okarito Nature Tours (now Okarito Kayaks), a kayaking ecotourism business on Okarito Lagoon, South Westland. We purchased this business from it’s founders, Ian & Debbie James. Ian & Debbie used to provide for their kayakers a repellent consisting of citronella mixed with moisturising body oil.

Citronella has long been used as an insect repellent. It is extracted from citronella grass by steam distillation. The citronella oil we use comes from Sri Lanka. Most commercial repellents contain DEET (diethyltoluamide) which was developed by the United States military to protect their soldiers from malaria in South East Asian wars. DEET is known to dissolve many plastics and synthetic fabrics . This would be very damaging to our kayak equipment so we tried to discourage its use by providing a free alternative.

We continued to provide this repellent free to our kayak customers. Many kayakers would return from their trips and  tell us how well our repellent had worked, often saying it had worked better than their store-bought repellent, and demanding that we sold them some. To this we would reply that we didn’t have any for sale, we only provided it for free.

Some of the Okarito Sandfly Repellent range

After a year or so of people requesting to buy our repellent, we decided we needed to do something about it. We bought 50 plastic bottles and printed out labels from our computer. We thought these might last a year or so, but they sold out in a month. So I bought 100 bottles and they rapidly sold out. Then 500….clearly the universe was trying to tell us something.

So we look into it further – we decided to use 100% natural oils – no chemicals, alcohol, ethanol or any other additives that are found in most repellents. We switched to sweet almond oil as a carrier for the citronella oil. Sweet almond oil is an excellent skin moisturiser. We had labels printed by a printer, and started wholesaling our repellent to some other retailers.

Our repellent was a great sideline to the kayak business. On wet weather days we would sit around drinking coffee and bottling repellent. However as our busy kayaking season coincided with the sandfly-ridden summer months we were never really able to get on the road and market it at the times when we really needed to.

In 2014 we leased out (and eventually sold) our kayak business and moved temporarily to Central Otago to get our son closer to a high school. This move gave us more time to market our repellent, develop our branding and systems, and start an online shop. We moved back to Okarito in 2019 and our repellent is all made and distributed from there. We now supply our repellent to more than 100 retailers nationwide plus online sales.