Maritime Carol

Before I up-skilled on bar crossings today, all I knew about them was that there was three kinds of bars - dangerous, very dangerous and very very dangerous - in other words, they're ALL dangerous.   Living on the Kaipara Harbour for sixteen years and being involved with Coastguard Kaipara, I know the Kaipara Bar is dangerous.  We all do - it's not called the Graveyard without a good reason. I crossed the Raglan Bar on a good day and the swells were huge.  I can imagine how rough it would get with adverse weather & tide. With the tragedy over the weekend and not being a bar crossing expert, I checked out MNZ's National Code of Practice for Bar Crossings.   There are the procedures: stow gear low, wear life-jackets, check weather, tide & bar conditions, batten down, avoid night crossings and ebb tide...etc However, at the end of the recommendations it states: "It is ultimately the skipper's responsibility to determine whether or not to cross a bar...

                On this day in 1839 (177yrs ago) the captain of the 832ton sailing barque TORY, ordered his crew to drop anchor in Ship's Cove, Queen Charlotte Sound. They had just completed a ninety six day passage from England with cargo and eight passengers on board.   TORY was the first ship dispatched by the New Zealand Company on a mission to locate and take possession of land purchased by the company in England before her departure.  Her name is forever etched into our history as the channel where the Cook Strait ferry enters the Marlborough Sounds. For the next thirty six days, they took on fresh water, food and wood, then sailing into Port Nicholson(Wellington).  Chaffers Passage in Wellington is named after her captain, Captain Edmund Mein Chaffers, a former sailing master in the Royal Navy. TORY then sailed up the west coast to Hokianga where they loaded spars.    On the 19 December...