The death of a watersider who died aboard a ship at the Port of Lyttelton yesterday will hit the close knit workforce and community hard, Maritime Union of New Zealand says.

A distraught fishing-boat crew returned to port yesterday after a colleague was lost overboard.

The wife of a man who died while checking his crayfish pots on Tuesday says her husband loved nothing more than his garden and fishing.

The body of a second fisherman who had been missing since a boat capsized off the Kaikoura coastline yesterday morning has been recovered.

An American overstayer has been banned from sailing from the Bay of Islands for the Pacific Islands because his yacht is unsafe.

Maritime New Zealand says it is working with the fishing industry to develop new safety systems that may make wearing lifejackets compulsory when crossing bars such as the dangerous Grey River.

A proposed levy increase on the maritime industry to pay for cleaning up possible oil spills has been labelled "madness" by an MP.

We can take some serious lessons from this and we are lucky to have the opportunity to refine our ability to respond and mitigate damage in any future events, writes Sam Judd.

When the Rena hit the Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga, we were in the middle of the Rugby World Cup. The scale of the disaster took a while to sink in. Did we panic?