There we were – Hunter and Humphrey – man and beast lolling around Katikati on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Thrown together by fate – or Humphrey's dicky biological compass – or the whiff of a story.

The late wildlife photographer Brian Chudleigh captured this shot of his 16-year-old daughter Janice witnessing Humphrey in her waterhole in the Uretara Stream in the 1980s.

Katikati is a place I always thought of as somewhere you passed through on the way to somewhere else. But no, we'd stopped here. Humphrey for all eternity; and me for a considerable lesser time.

In reality Humphrey was three tonnes of itinerant blubber – a sea elephant, barking, snorting, angry, threatening, and apparently ponging like a sewer outfall. Sea elephants do eat and poop seafood. But despite himself, we still managed to romanticise Humphrey.

He frequented Katikati and the Tauranga Harbour coastline during the 1980s, creating a stir as he went, with people perhaps experiencing their closest encounter with a sea elephant – ever.

'He did put Katikati on the map,” says long-time local Selwyn Mair, with qualification. 'A little bit.”

So Humphrey was bigger than kiwifruit, murals and the potato top pies from the Cambodian bakery? 'Not really, I don't think so,” says Selwyn. Let us keep the Humphrey phenomena in perspective.

But we loved the idea Humphrey chose us, chose Katikati, ahead of his harem and the frozen Sub-Antarctic wastelands and all points in between. He'd even thumbed his ample proboscis at pretentious Bowentown to reach fun city - the estuaries, creeks and mud holes of Uretara Stream.

We didn't care we didn't own Humphrey – we just loved the idea of a bus and carloads of visitors coming to Katikati to see another visitor. Katikati just sat comfortably in the middle, selling gallons of tea and acres of scones.

And even when Humphrey did a bunk we kept the memory alive. There he is – for all time – large but inanimate, hewn from a macrocarpa log down by Uretara Jetty just off Main Street in Katikati where he's pictured, painted and pawed – a monument to his own legend.

Everyone I speak to in KatiKati steers me to the statue. I'm not immediately taken by it because Humphrey is not to scale, it's not an exactness, nor the right colour.

'But it's a quite substantial sculpture,” says a mildly offended Selwyn. 'And if it's not the same size, it's pretty close.” Selwyn should know. He encountered Humphrey several times.

Sculptor Neville Warner's artistically defensive of is creation. 'It's a freehand chainsaw carving mate.” And the artist is only as good as his resources. In this case the artist was constrained by the size of the log. Fair enough.

And we're grateful because Neville found the log in West Auckland, trucked it to Katikati and sculpted and gifted it to the town he grew up in. Gratis.

'Because that's the kind of person I am I suppose – stupid perhaps?” No, magnanimous definitely Neville.

There's a colour issue though. The sculpture is brown like an Easter offering and sea elephants are grey.

There is a simple disgusting explanation which you can skim read if you choose. They develop brown or rusty orange patches while they're ashore moulting, apparently wallowing in their own excrement which stains their hide.

We will sanitise history in this case and say Humphrey never had that urge.

If you can put that thought aside, we're also revisiting the legend because it's as enchanting and enthralling as it was 30 years ago. Like the stories of Opo the dolphin, and Pelorous Jack. They're indelible.

And also because some wonderful images have come to light – images shot by Brian Chudleigh, a wildlife photographer from Katikati, and very kindly shared with us by his wife Cushla.

That's his 16-year-old daughter Janice in the very proper leopard skin bikini posing with Humphrey.

Cushla still remembers the day Janice came racing into the kitchen and breathlessly announced Humphrey was in her swim hole. Don't be alarmed by the photo because Humphrey did impressions of ‘dead' very well.

Humphrey spent a lot of time up the creek wallowing.

'He caught eels and rats and stuff to eat,” says Selwyn. And there were no natural predators up there – no white pointers or orca. Just myriads of nosey parkers, photographers, the fascinated and mildly interested.

And he bellowed at them through his massive trunk like proboscis if they got too close. Apparently, the noise could only get worse during the rutting season when he was courting.

But there was no mate. However, as the Brindson family of Opoutere learned, a sea elephant in need is a sea elephant obsessed and dangerous. Lovelorn Humphrey eventually came ashore at Opoutere, clambered up a drain and settled on a dairy farm.

'I remember his breath was just foul,” says farmer's wife Helen Brindson.

When husband Allan brought the cows in for milking Humphrey would lumber over to the race and rear up to check 'the girls”. That spooked the cows, turned them and sent them scuttling back down the race.

A novelty soon became a nuisance when Humphrey crushed a fence and gate in a moment of passion. Allan Brindson even had to turn a high pressure hose on Humphrey to cool his ardour when the cows were being milked.

There was no love, no union and no comfort for Humphrey.

But there was fame. The world converged on the Brindson family – the BBC, American television, local radio stations and newspapers. Helicopters were landing on their front lawn.

'All you would hear is producers saying ‘Mrs Brindson standing by' for this channel or that channel. The place was crawling with people. And the only mistake we made is not charging them a dollar a head.”

Three months and an electric fence later, Humphrey, drawn by his instincts, the prospect of a feed of fish or unrequited love, retreated back down the drain and out to sea.

'We heard him – a distinctive motorbike in water sound. But we never saw him again.”

There was gossip that the nuisance became bigger than the novelty and Humphrey was shot and killed. It was only gossip and not gossip we'd like to buy into.

So Humphrey, the unsociable, unsavoury but eminently loveable oceangoing earless seal of the genus Mirounga was gone. But the legend remains larger than Humphrey himself.

And to think his kind were almost hunted to extinction for their blubber.

I never encountered Humphrey, but his stories have me warming to Neville's statue.