LOOK WHERE YOU ARE GOING

The container ship Rena and me - 10 years on.

The container ship Rena, Astrolabe Reef in the Bay of Plenty, October 4th 2011

A day after my birthday on 4 October 2011 the container ship Rena ploughed into the marked Astrolabe Reef in the Bay of Plenty while approaching Tauranga Harbour.

The first I knew about this event was a two-paragraph piece in the Herald: “Ship Runs Aground on Reef”. Interesting. Two high tides and 24 hours later, I noted that she was still there.

Then the alarm bells really went off.

The next day I was winging my way to Tauranga, along with scores of other communications, technical, environmental, police, customs, Maritime NZ, salvage, Navy, bird rescue, and other people to try and make sense of this mess.

For a mess, it turned out to be. And a classic case of not looking where you are going. The officers on the bridge failed to properly plot their position, then failed to navigate to the north around the reef. They did try to find it by using binoculars, but that doesn’t work too well in the middle of the night.

My role for the following ten days in Tauranga as a communications staffer (words and pictures, not radios) was to write news releases, organise press conferences, and gather up suitable photographs, graphs and information for distribution to the news media and other stakeholders.

New Zealand was hosting the Rugby World Cup at the time, and the country was full of overseas journalists – and now many were re-assigned to cover an event almost bigger than the All Blacks. Local and central government politicians, salvage experts, ship owners became the centre of attention, with the ship on the reef losing containers into the sea, and 350 tonnes of bunker fuel spilt, with that and more ending up on Tauranga’s beaches.

The Rena is the largest ship ever lost in New Zealand waters at 37,209 tons gross registered tonnage. The stranding was New Zealand’s ‘worst maritime environmental disaster’.

But this wasn’t New Zealand’s only big ship stranding. And I had my eye on that event too.

In 2002, huge swells caused the log ship Jody F Millennium to break its moorings in Gisborne Harbour. While it was being shepherded to safety out to sea, a big wave drove the ship onto a nearby beach, where it remained stranded for 18 days. The Jody F leaked 25 tonnes of heavy fuel oil into Poverty Bay, affecting about 8 km of coastline.

At the time I was attending a Civil Defence communications course in Wellington, and the trainees were able to observe - from further away - how the salvage and the communications operation evolved.

After the removal of most of her cargo, the ship was eventually pulled off the beach, and the damage to the environment was not quite so serious as the Rena event.

The two events also serve to remind us of how important it is to look at the weather reports and to look where you’re going. In 2009 our yacht was an insurance write off when a powerboat slammed into the cockpit while we were motoring out of an anchorage. In broad daylight. Again, the powerboat skipper not looking where he was going. He received a hefty fine.

Take care.