Our group of 29 people met at the Taumanu Reserve carpark at 2pm ready to do a walk that would follow the coastline just about all the way to Westfield. We began by street-walking over the hill to the start of the new Waikowhai Walkway boardwalk that was completed in February this year. Out came the brollies and ponchos as a shower passed over, but by the time we reached the boardwalk we had dry weather for the rest of our walk. The boardwalk followed the rocky foreshore to the new Onehunga beaches, and we carried on past these beaches and under the Mangere Bridge to come to the Onehunga-Westfield walkway-cycleway. We were able to see a few seabirds out on the low tide as we carried along this walkway, passing Waikaraka Park and cemetery.

Further on at about 3:30pm we stopped for our afternoon tea break. Tina presented devotions based on Proverbs 16:3 Commit our actions to the Lord and your plans will succeed. If you wanted to rob a bank and committed this to Him, you wouldn't succeed of course. To commit your plans to God means to hand them over and let Him look and work them over to match His will. If you accept these revised plans and act on them, you will succeed.

At this point some of the drivers left us to go back to the start to bring their cars over to Onehunga to pick us up at the end of our walk. We continued along the foreshore all the way to the Southdown rail overbridge, the last part being along the old track which is now walkway only. From the overbridge we could look down to the branch line that runs from the main south line to the Kiwirail Metroport goods yards.

We turned around and followed the new cycleway section to begin retracing our footsteps back to Onehunga. It was close to 5pm when we finished, having covered a whole 11km, about one-and-a-half times the normal distance for a Sunday afternoon walk.