Ms McAlpine is moving this month to a new home in Haast township, close to the Fantail Cafe where she works.
It is an undoubted wrench to leave her small crib on the Waita River Reserve, on the shores of the Tasman Sea.
She and her late partner, Rick Dibbens, shared a memorable 14 years there in the company of wayfarers and whitebait campers, before Mr Dibbens died in 2002.
Six years down the track, time is up for this diminutive woman, who does not want to carry on the whitebait purchasing business on her own.
She has undergone two knee operations recently and is struggling to maintain the large property and business she has been involved with for 20 years.
"I am ready to be leaving here. But I just love it here," she told the Otago Daily Times.
Ms McAlpine first visited Waita as a family friend of Mr Dibbens and his late wife, Marge.
She and her former husband had met the Dibbens family while living in Nelson in the 1970s.
Her husband had advertised some pig dogs for sale, the men teamed up to go hunting and the families would picnic and water ski together.
The Dibbens had six boys, while Ms McAlpine and her husband had five girls.
Mrs Dibbens died in a car accident in 1987 and a year later Ms McAlpine - who was by now a single woman - moved from Christchurch to Waita to be with Mr Dibbens.
It was not always plain sailing for the pair, who never got married despite the purchase of two engagement rings.
But Mr Dibbens had made up his mind she was the woman for him and sent off large bunches of roses to her workplace in Christchurch to win her heart.
"He courted me so hard, you wouldn't believe it. He was incredibly romantic," Ms McAlpine said.
Mr Dibbens had set up his whitebait buying business at Waita in 1970, after other buyers asked if he could help sell their catches.
His operation started from a collection of caravans and grew like topsy.
A crib was built and later extended, a large tunnel-house was erected to cover a swimming pool and vegetable garden, and a massive shed was also built to house freezers and the packing operation.
Items accumulated around the crib for quite some time, in the acknowledged West Coast manner, until Ms McAlpine had a big tidy-up.
During the season, whitebait was sent north to be stockpiled in coolstores in other towns, while one tonne was kept at home for sale from the premises.
In February, the couple would pack up their truck with a freezer on the back, go raid their stockpiles and sell whitebait around South Island clubs, shops and supermarkets.
Life at home mainly revolved around family, crib owners and the campers.
When the couple got gas, they began offering hot showers. Ms McAlpine made lemon honey for them, using the fruit of one, very productive tree.
She made blackcurrant jam and tomato relish and grew massive stalks of rhubarb. She produced carrots, cabbages and passionfruit galore.
"I am not very good at yarning but I know one year, Rick bought 10 ton - that's ton, not tonnes - of whitebait and they were bringing it in any old how. Anything they could find to bring it in - sacks, pantyhose. I thought that was quite hilarious. They [pantyhose] really fill up.
"One person who didn't like Rick dropping his price decided he would take his bait back to Dunedin. But when he got to Dunedin he realised his dif [sic] in the truck had been heating up the bait and he got nothing for it.
"That season, Rick was frantically on the phone to sellers. There was so much of it and he had to move it really fast. But he reckoned he only earned $700 that year," Ms McAlpine recalled.
Mr Dibbens learned a valuable lesson from the struggle to sell vast amounts of fresh whitebait quickly, even at a low price, before it went off.
By the time the next season rolled around, he had invested in a walk-in freezer and the packing operation began in earnest.
Ms McAlpine recalled having to stir the chilled whitebait to stop the ones in the middle warming up.
They liked to have catches packed and dispatched within three days because after five days people no longer fancied it, she said.
From 1997, the couple stopped going on big selling tours but continued to take orders from Waita over the telephone.
The operation was a vital business for the tiny community.
Life by the sea continued in the normal undulating way of things until 2002, when Mr Dibbens was diagnosed with lung cancer.
The cancer diagnosis was upsetting because the couple believed it could have been treated earlier if more inquiries had been made about a shadow on his lung that had appeared on an earlier X-ray.
After Mr Dibbens died, Ms McAlpine found the going tougher every year as sales dropped off.
A large client fell through in 2006, the same year she had her first knee operation.
In 2007, she cracked her pelvis in a fall and in that same year she underwent her second knee operation.
She lost a lot of time in her garden but employed a handyman, until he moved on to Nelson.
For the last year, Ms McAlpine has been working at the Fantail Cafe, where she had previously worked for about four years when a family member owned it.
Although it is the end of her era at Waita, Ms Alpine believes the new crib owners intend to continue whitebait buying and packing.
Ms McAlpine says she does not want a leaving party because she is only moving down the road to Haast.
Her Waita friends have told her she will be missed and she promises to come back and see how they are getting on.
"They are lovely. They would never see you stuck. There's a real mix of characters on this river and they are a lot of fun," she said.
