Obituary: Warwick Dunsford

Warwick Dunsford

* Captain Warwick Dunsford, marine surveyor. Died aged 80.

Warwick Dunsford was a large, respected and familiar figure around the Auckland waterfront for several decades from the mid-1950s.

His job involved salvaging ships and boats that had got into trouble, surveying countless others and also assessing claims over damaged cargoes.

For some years, the master mariner and marine surveyor also taught night classes for Auckland boaties on the basics of navigation. The classes are remembered still, because he instructed in a way that even those bemused by school mathematics could understand.

His knowledge of ships and the sea sprang from four years as a youngster on a sailing ship - an experience he counted as the "best time of his life".

Born in Napier, he came from a family with seafaring connections. The Napier wharves were a childhood haunt.

His chance to go to sea came when he was about 17. The four-masted Finnish sailing ship Pamir was seized as a prize of war by the New Zealand Government and, in 1942, pressed into service to help transport wartime cargoes, particularly to North America.

Dunsford got a job as a deck boy and over six voyages progressed to ordinary seaman, able seaman and then sailmaker. He loved it.

The iron-built Pamir had about 40 crew. Constructed in 1905, the 97m ship - almost as long as a rugby field between the goal lines - could carry more than 3700sq m of sail.

The routine was four hours on duty and four off, during which the crew had to eat, study, sleep (in cabins amidships each with 10 bunks) then go back on deck. Fresh food did not last long.

"It didn't worry us. There was no hardship. It was fun," Dunsford recalled.

His first voyage took 89 days, a time with just the sound of the wind and the ship sliding through the water at up to 12 knots, for the Pamir had no engines.

One wartime afternoon, in 1944-45, the crew was called on deck, donned lifejackets and swung out lifeboats. A Japanese submarine's conning tower was visible about five miles away. Then it disappeared.

Later Dunsford heard of a Japanese submarine commander who said he saw the Pamir but decided not to sink it. (Eventually the Pamir sank in a 1957 hurricane with most of its 86 hands lost.)

Dunsford became a captain in 1945 at only 25 and served on many ships with the New Zealand Shipping Company and others until he came ashore and developed his business.

Among his salvage jobs was the Radio Hauraki pirate ship Tiri, which broke its mooring one stormy night in 1968 outside territorial waters off Great Barrier Island and went ashore at Ruakaka, in Northland.

Family and friends always recognised several Dunsford hallmarks perhaps harking from his sailing days - a sure-footedness on any vessel he climbed aboard and a profound respect for the sea and its dangers. And a booming voice, which on his entrance at parties often created an impression like that of a vessel approaching under full sail.

Warwick Dunsford was involved in many organisations and institutions including the naval reserve. But he was seldom to be found far from ships and the sea.

He was predeceased by his wife, Thirsa, whom he married in 1951, and is survived by children and descendants.