Ghosts of Wanganui's seafaring past

Remnants from the glory days of Wanganui's port linger on the south bank of the river estuary. Maritime historian Geoff Potts has been trialling a guided 1km walk there, with stops to talk about port history. He leads it again on January 10, as part of the Whanganui Summer Programme.
GEOFF POTTS' grandfather, Arthur Croom, was in charge of the cool stores at Castlecliff Wharf in the 1920s, when butter and cheese were loaded into small boats and ferried out to sea to bigger vessels bound for England.
The big ships anchored at the offshore "roadstead" up until World War II. After that the lighters that had ferried goods to them were taken for the war. The offshore anchorage was never reinstated.
Like his grandfather, Geoff loves the sea. He used to fish from the wrecked Te Anau, in the Castlecliff Harbour basin, and also commercially from the coast.
Sometimes he cleaned his catch on the south side of the rivermouth. The wrecks there fascinated him, and he wanted to know more. "I've been dabbling in maritime history since 1976. I know a lot of people that have passed away that have told me information," he said.
One of them  had been Bruce Attwell, who wrote The Wharves of Wanganui: how maritime commerce built a city. Another  was his mentor, Trevor Gibson, a former Wanganui dredgemaster and port captain still involved with the paddlesteamer, Waimarie, with Coastguard Wanganui and with teaching water safety. "I've picked up after Bruce Attwell left off, trying to keep history alive. I believe we owe it to our forefathers," Geoff said. "We are just riddled
with history."
He's amassed a precious collection of old photographs and postcards and says he uses the paperspast.natlib.govt.nz website for research.
His guided walk  starts on the riverbank near the collection of army huts below Landguard Bluff. From there, people can climb the hill to the World War  II defence structures at the top, a strategic high point with good views out to sea.
One of the structures used to house a 5-inch ex-United States naval gun. The other was an observational command post.
"They're basically as they were when they were built."
The high point is a good place to contemplate what's left of the Imlay Wharf - once a bustling landing for lighters carrying meat out to larger ships.
The next stop, heading downriver, is the remains of the steamship Mana, a lighter owned by the New Zealand Refrigerating Co.
In 1937, at the end of its working life, it was positioned on the riverbank to strengthen a place where the river used to veer south.
Holding the bank downstream from it is what's left of the kauri steamship Wetere, which caught fire while  at the Imlay Wharf in 1936. Both boats were positioned  lengthways, with heavy posts to stop them moving.
With them were Agnes and Flora, two of the barges used to carry silt dredged up from the riverbed.
"I've been told that they were named after the daughters of the Imlay manager," Geoff said.
The bucket dredge, Garibaldi, which looked like a tin shed on a raft, operated from about 1890 to 1920, towed out into the river by the tugs Togo and Mascotte. Also known as Old Faithful, the Garibaldi scooped mud up from the bottom of the river and pumped it through pipes  on to the barges.
They would be towed out into the river on an outgoing tide. The doors in their sides opened and released silt, to be swept away out to sea.
The Garibaldi dredged the channels to the city's  wharves. They were at Castlecliff, at Imlay, at the gasworks, a petrol wharf near the present Cobham Bridge and the Town Wharf, near the present Chronicle building.
The Garibaldi had a former life as a gold dredge in the Ahaura River, near Greymouth. It was broken down, shipped north by rail, and re-assembled in Wanganui.
It was succeeded in 1919 by the Kaione, a suction dredge whose piped sand was used to build up South Beach and parts of the Castlecliff port area.
Heading downriver,  tour groups  head to Big Bay.
It's a natural bay in the river, Geoff says, and at its former wharf, slabs of shellrock from the Kaiwhaiki quarry were unloaded from barges and transferred to a small steam train. It carried them downriver to add to the South Mole.
At low tide the cab of a crane is still visible in Big Bay, along with the possible remains of one of the Wanganui Harbour Board longboats.
Geoff remembers people eeling and netting flounder, mullet and kahawai in Big Bay, in the days when the river was regarded as a convenient conduit for waste.
"It used to be absolutely polluted with industrial and human waste. Now it's a pleasure walking there. It's back to what it should be, in hard sand."
At  that point,  tour groups will pause and look across to the present harbour basin and the wreck of the Te Anau, the last Union Steam Ship Co passenger vessel visible above water.
"All the others, and there were dozens of them, were sunk, or disappeared, or were scrapped."
Geoff says the Te Anau was once a luxury transtasman passenger vessel. It was bought for use as a dismantled vessel and placed in the harbour basin in 1924 to extend the rock wall that creates still water for the port.
Built of mild steel, the Te Anau has resisted rust well. It was placed on top of the Enterprise, a sailing ship sunk there earlier for the same purpose.
A hole was made in the wall of the harbour basin in the 1990s, in the hope  current would sweep out the sediment clogging it.
People are still debating the success of that. Geoff said there was no evidence it had worked.
The remains of "dolphins" - posts and platforms holding the navigation lights that used to mark the river channel - can still be seen in places. The lights were fuelled by paraffin oil and serviced by Wanganui Harbour Board, until the board ceased to exist and Ocean Terminals took over in the late 1980s. River City Port then took over  in 2004.
The historic walk ends at the start of South Mole, with some reflections on the harbour's future. Geoff reckons it still has potential - but on a very limited scale. He says it's suitable for use by tugs and barges, and shallow-draft coastal vessels like the Anatoki which takes urea to the South Island and returns with loads of dolomite lime.
"The port was also used to ship South Island hay up here during the drought of 2007-08. After that the hay was trucked to Taranaki and Waikato."
Bookings for the Whanganui River Bank Walk can be made at the city's Riverboat Centre.