Trip Report by Stan Woodhouse

Monday morning began as Auckland mornings often do; with thundering rain. This clichéd dawn of the week stung all the more for the fact the University semester was over and another day of freedom was being lost to the temperamental Auckland weather. Ignoring gale warnings and driving sleet, Dan, Tom and I made our way to the Okahu Bay Marina. The boats behind the Breakwater evoked the image of drunken fencers as their masts swung back and forth. The pontoon wharf had broken into three distinct segments. Our enthusiasm began to wane as we stood in the wind watching the swells mount the sea wall and was altogether extinguished when a mariner-worker, upon seeing our five-foot inflatable dinghy, threatened to notify the coastguard if we even approached the harbour. Beaten into submission by common sense we agreed to meet the next day, forget the Waitemata and drive North to Whangaparoa Peninsular. A shipwreck laying in shallow water, just off a headland beckoned.

Tuesday morning, in complete contradiction to the days it followed, was a solid indication that summer had arrived. The sun was up and the windows on the station wagon were down. The dive site was at the eastern end of the Whangaparoa Peninsular just swimming distance from the coast. A stretch of grass, a beach and stumble over sandstone separates the carpark from the wreck. Trudging the distance in full SCUBA garb no doubt filters out less motivated divers as the tank and weightbelt slowly compressed my six foot four frame into a Rodney Hide-sized nugget. As we three intrepid divers rounded the point, the boiler came into view; a broken, rusted barrel that, along with several other pieces of weather-beaten metal marked the final resting place of our ship. What the ship was before it sank is hard to tell. Aside from an account of a hulk being sunk as a breakwater in Okoromai Bay, to the west of the wreck’s current location, records don’t shed any light on its origin and as few divers have taken the time to visit, no identifying artifact has been pulled from it.

Tom, who had dived the wreck once before, pointed out to Dan and I the shadow lying just beneath the water’s surface. Tom had first dived the wreck with AUUC’s Mike Batey who found the ships prop at its coastal end, suggesting it had somehow gone aground stern-first.

A tapered, steel arm protrudes from the sea’s surface at the supposed stern end of the wreck and finning from the rocks we quickly reached it. From the surface it was evident that Monday’s weather had hit Whangaparoa as visibility was a cozy metre at best. Sticking together would be an exercise in futility so we wished each other a good dive and went our separate ways. I dived straight to the bottom and headed for where I thought I would find the midship section. Although somewhat broken up, the wreck still retains its fundamental shape and contains multiple pockets where limited penetration is possible. From one end to the other the complete ship would have measured between sixty and seventy feet long. Broken up, it stretches over a greater area as structures have broken off and spread themselves around the remaining segments of the hull. The seaward point of the ship is the deepest, most intact segment and structurally resembles the stern more than the bow, although with the discovery of the prop by the coast, either end could be the bow, or the stern. Future dives will tell. The wreck is carpeted in thick kelp and enormous orange encrusting sponges. Tube worms protrude from the sediment under the hull and parore shelter among collapsed steel beams. Broken shells are strewn across the seafloor, betraying the presence of octopi and red crabs cower as a diver’s shadow passes over them.

After just over an hour of searching the wreck, reaching a max depth of just under five metres all three divers surfaced and scrambled onto dry land. On the return hike to the car, artefacts were compared. All three divers had found similar bottles, either born from the ship’s cargo or deposited subsequently by a liquored-up fisherman. In addition to the bottles, a piece of terracotta bearing the Unicorn of Scotland (one element of the British Royal Coat Of Arms) and a copper key were recovered.

The wreck lies in a relatively exposed position so the fact much of it still remains indicates it is not one of New Zealands oldest, however the growth it supports is immense and dispels any notion it could have sunk in the last decade, or several decades before that. Sooner or later someone will come forward with the wreck’s identity and the story of how it came to be laying off the coast of Whangaparoa Peninsular but until then, it remains our cryptic little piece of New Zealand nautical history.

Filed under: Diving New Zealand, Trip Reports