‘New Zealand’s a great place to build a boat,’ Haazen says. ‘People and businesses were so supportive and helpful.’
With the design process under way, Haazen took a job labouring at a steel boatbuilders in Kumeu for a few months. ‘They were building round-bilge steel boats — just like Tiama — and my time there was invaluable. It taught me how to tool up to do the job properly and how to manage the project.’ So, when the pile of steel that would become Tiama was unloaded on the factory floor in April 1991, he set to work straight away, lofting the design out and building the 36 frames, spaced on 42-centimetre centres, that would define her shapely hull form.
Another friend, Doug Dingle of Triangle Marine, gave freely of his advice at this stage. ‘He’s had a lot of experience building steel and alloy boats, so every time I came across a problem I’d ring him for advice. He was really generous with his time — he showed me how to make a work plan, and a materials list, as if I was a professional boatbuilder,’ Haazen said. ‘He taught me how to build the boat in components — like a jigsaw puzzle.
‘I’d ask Doug what tolerances I could build the frames to — "A pencil-line thickness" he’d answer,’ he laughed.
Haazen bought a second-hand rolling machine to bend the steel plates and the hull plating — 10 millimetres thick on the bottom and 5 millimetres elsewhere — was bent to shape and welded into place. ‘If you buy good professional machinery at the start of the project and look after it, you can sell it on later to recover costs,’ he explained.
The boat’s six-tonne ballasted swing keel was also fabricated and the casing that would house it was welded in place between the hull and deck inside the boat. ‘The keel was a major,’ he grinned. ‘I reckon it added six months to the building time.’ The keel is hydraulically raised or lowered, and Tiama draws 3 metres with it down or 1.2 metres with the board up.
Haazen worked from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week, while Bunny kept ‘food on the table’ working as a campaign coordinator at Greenpeace New Zealand. Sundays were reserved for family time, he said. ‘You’ve got to look at the project as a job — you’ve got to go there every working day, but you need time off, too.
‘It really helps to have a lock-up building to work in — it means friends can drop in to help at any time. You can make a nice workplace, have music on, and just down tools and walk away when you need to — without having to pack everything up.’
Within four years, the steelwork was all finished. Most of the stainless-steel fittings on the market were either too expensive or too flimsy for a 30-tonne expedition yacht, so Haazen geared up for TIG welding and built his own. Buying stainless steel at scrap prices, he fabricated big, solid cleats out of old propeller shafts. Bollards, fairleads, rope reels and stanchions were all added to Tiama’s deck hardware. A big stainless-steel wheel was built and installed to turn the yacht’s mechanical steering gear.
Meanwhile, Haazen had also managed to fit in three months sea-time a year, mostly on Greenpeace ships working against French nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll or establishing a base in Antarctica. ‘It’s good to step back from the project every now and again to recharge your batteries,’ he said. ‘You come back with new energy and vision.’
Back in the shed, Tiama was taking shape. Four double-bottom tanks to carry 2500 litres of diesel had been welded into the hull. Another three tanks were to hold 1800 litres of fresh water and there was provision for 500 litres of grey water and 350 litres of sewage within the hull. Big tankages, for a boat that was designed and built to sustain expeditions in the most inhospitable parts of the planet.
When it came to installing Tiama’s interior, Haazen didn’t feel like re-training himself as a cabinetmaker, so another friend, Whitianga boatbuilder John Simpson, came aboard to craft a practical and workable interior within her 4.5-metre beam. An owner’s cabin on the starboard side included a large double bunk and there were two more bunks placed in another cabin on the port side of the cockpit. A long galley area to port allowed for the big meals that people working out in the field need, and a cosy dining area, warmed by a diesel heater, was located to starboard of the centreboard casing. ‘Food’s a big thing on an expedition,’ Haazen, a vegetarian and enthusiastic cook, explained. ‘It’s got to be readily available, hot and nutritious.’ Further forward, there were two more bunks to port and a double and single berth in a separate cabin to starboard. Toilet areas were located forward and aft, with a shower in the forward one.
Tiama’s forepeak is the area many cruising sailors yearn for. The chain locker forward holds 110 metres of 10-millimetre anchor chain. Next aft is the 30-horsepower Mercury outboard that powers Tiama’s Lancer inflatable, and after that it’s all workbench with a grinder, vice and bins of spare parts, fasteners and tools.
Aft, two cavernous cockpit lockers can swallow all the gear and provisions needed to keep a pair of albatross researchers at the Antipodes for three months, with room left over for deck gear, the inflatable and a spare dinghy with its own 15 horsepower outboard.
Mummery also kept tabs on the project and was a valuable source of information. ‘Everybody who saw Tiama had advice to give, but Alan’s the expert and I did whatever he recommended — he reckoned Tiama was the heaviest-displacement boat he’d designed in 25 years,’ Haazen said.
A mast was sourced from Warren Brown’s Bermuda-based yacht, War Baby, which had been dismasted at the Auckland Islands on a voyage from the Ross Sea. The undamaged 19.5-metre top section of the spar fitted Tiama perfectly and was thoroughly checked over, re-rigged and stepped on deck.
A 95-horsepower four-cylinder Perkins diesel was installed, bolted to a Borg Warner 3:1 hydraulic gearbox. It drives a four-bladed fixed propeller to give a cruising speed of 7.5 knots. The Perkins also powers the hydraulic pump which drives her Simpson Lawrence V2000 windlass and the swing-keel lifting gear. An 8.5-horsepower Yanmar auxiliary, installed underfloor, can be employed to run a layshaft which also operates the ship’s systems.
Ground tackle is also in keeping with Tiama’s role in the world’s wilder places. The working anchor is a 60-kilogram CQR, backed up by a 30-kilogram Bruce, a 25-kilogram Danforth and a 20-kilogram Delta anchor. Mooring lines are carried on reels at each end of the boat.
Finally, Tiama’s stylish steel dodger was fitted with windows of 8-millimetre toughened glass. (The side windows were later replaced with 15-millimetre toughened glass after a wave punched one out off Campbell Island.)
Tiama was finally approved by the venerable marine insurer Lloyds of London, and entered into the New Zealand Safe Ship Management system with unlimited (worldwide) certification, the only yacht in the country to do so. Haazen had already passed a New Zealand Offshore Masters ticket, and the outfit was ready to roll. Over 200 people turned up for Tiama’s launching at an Auckland marina in December 1998, and the boat’s maiden sail was a 1200-mile thrash to the Kermadec Islands and back. ‘We found a few teething problems — the only way to do that is on a serious offshore trip,’ Haazen said.
Tiama’s next passage was 5000 miles across the Southern Ocean to meet a group of Australian climbers at Ushuaia, Argentina. She passed Cape Horn to port on the first anniversary of her launch and went on to support the climbers for five weeks while they scaled some virgin peaks on the Antarctic Peninsula. A 32-day charter through the Patagonian Canals, from Cape Horn to Puerto Montt, followed.
From Patagonia, Tiama plied back across the Pacific to fulfil a support role for a Greenpeace campaign on Australia’s east coast, visiting every port between Cairns and Brisbane. Next assignment for the yacht was a charter to film the millennium sunrise from the first land to see its rays, New Zealand’s Antipodes Islands, and broadcast the images, with a message of hope, to the world via satellite.
During 2000 to 2001, Tiama sailed as part of a peace flotilla to protest against plutonium shipments through the Pacific and on a Greenpeace nuclear-free campaign around South Australia. The following year, she was back in the subantarctic i
slands supporting a team of kayakers paddling a circumnavigation of the Aucklands, and later on a 20-day historical survey for the Department of Conservation.
The boat’s next job took her deep into the tropics, 350 miles up the Fly River in Papua New Guinea where she served as a communications centre for local tribespeople battling against hardwood logging on their land. ‘It’s all uncharted water up there — the lifting keel was really handy as a depth sounder,’ Haazen smiled. After three months in the jungle, Tiama had to clear out by the end of the rainy season, or spend a year stranded inland.
Tiama’s stock-in-trade these days is ferrying DoC staff and scientists to the subantarctic islands from Bluff, and lately Haazen has added a Royal Yachting Association approved coastal and offshore sailing school to his boat’s busy schedule. Candidates for day skipper or coastal yachtmaster courses can join the boat for her annual delivery trips to and from Bluff, or parts thereof.
‘I enjoy working for DoC,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit like working for Greenpeace except that you don’t get arrested at the end of the job. The people are the same — committed to conservation; nobody’s in it for the money.
‘And I’ve got the boat for the job — I may as well use her.’
BENEATH THE BOUNTIES
There is no PADI dive shop at the Bounty Islands. In fact, the nearest shop of any kind is 700 kilometres away in Bluff, New Zealand.
The 20 low islands are solid granite outcrops; the surface remnants of the submerged Bounty Plateau, their west coasts pounded by the relentless storms and sweeping seas of the Southern Ocean. To the east, sheer grey cliffs plunge into the surging sea, all devoid of vegetation.
But the Bounties teem with life. Above sea level, New Zealand fur seals and sea lions slumber around the shoreline like furry brown boulders, penguins waddle comically to and from their larder — the sea — and overhead a dynamic panorama of Salvin’s albatross, fulmar prions, cape pigeons and storm petrels glide, wheel and dive.
The diversity of animals above sea level is mirrored by those below the constant swells — but they’d rarely been observed by human eyes before a Department of Conservation dive team — Sean Cooper, Dr Franz Smith and Louise Hunter — visited the islands in the charter vessel Tiama in 2006.
‘As far as we know, only a few people have ever dived the Bounties before — or the Antipodes. There was a University of Otago team there in the 1980s and [photographer] Kim Westerskov later,’ Cooper explained, ‘otherwise we were the first comprehensive survey of underwater biodiversity there ever.
‘There are a few basic precautions you’ve got to bear in mind for diving there. Water temperature is around 11 to 13 degrees Celsius, there’s a constant surge — and great white sharks. In mainland New Zealand the sharks feed on fish, but in the subantarctics they eat fur seals and sea lion pups, which look uncomfortably like someone in a drysuit. The nearest doctor is hundreds of kilometres away … and because very few people have ever dived here, we didn’t know what to expect,’ he explained.
‘For the temperature we wore drysuits, there’s not a lot we could do about the surge except be careful we didn’t get dumped on a reef or rocky outcrop.’ Battery-powered shark shields, which create an electrical field around the divers, were employed and surface swimming was kept to a minimum to prevent undue water disturbance. ‘A diver was attacked by a shark at Campbell Island a few years ago. There’s 20,000 seals on the Bounties — and there’s a reason you never see them all in the water at once,’ he said. Dive computers were also used religiously, and safety pauses strictly adhered to when ascending.
‘The amazing thing about the islands,’ Cooper continued, ‘is the incredible diversity of life forms under the water. There’re no plants above the sea, but below the water, there’s heaps. Above the water they’re all grey rocks and white guano, but below there’s oranges, purples, yellows, blues and greens; anemones, coralline, lichens, seaweeds, algae.’ Visibility was typically 30 to 40 metres, he said, on the sheer rock walls, and there were no crayfish, low numbers of small virginia paua and few wetfish.
The divers employed a metre-square aluminium frame with an underwater stills camera mounted on one side which is pressed against the rock so that a square-metre area can be photographed. Transept lines on the frame indicate area guidelines and images are taken at depth intervals of (about) 5, 10, 15 metres, etc. Dr Smith enlarges the images later, then identifies and counts the number of different species in that particular area. Video cameras and a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) are also used.
‘There’s an amazing degree of diversity between different sites on the same island,’ he said. ‘We came across a species of seaweed which previously had only been known to science by one specimen — but on the Bounties we saw groves of it.’
The Wellington-based marine consultant is surveying other sites around the world in an attempt to establish global marine biodiversity guidelines for areas of special interest, and says that New Zealand’s subantarctic islands rate in the top 80 per cent of sites internationally. ‘That includes areas like the Seychelles, Galapagos and Patagonia,’ he says, ‘which you’d think would be full of life.’
‘The idea of this project is to establish baselines for the subantarctics,’ Cooper added. ‘The data we gather will be used to help make decisions about their conservation in the future and observe how changing climatic conditions affect them. Their extremely high biodiversity adds value and significance to these islands and their conservation.
‘The islands are designated as a nature reserve — and they’re protected by the weather and their remoteness; otherwise there’s no special protection.’
A particular threat is the invasive Asian seaweed Undaria which was accidentally imported in ships’ ballast water and has established itself at many mainland ports. Tiama’s underwater hull area was carefully searched by a diver for signs of the weed before she left Bluff.
‘We need to get a better understanding of Southern Ocean biodiversity — to better manage the islands as a whole,’ Cooper said. ‘Everything depends on the ocean down here.’
After three days and nine 30-minute or so dives at the Bounty Islands, Tiama retrieves her anchor from the rocky sea floor and heads for the Antipodes, 222 kilometres south. The geological variety between the two archipelagos is immediately evident: from the Bounties’ low granite outposts to the Antipodes’ soaring larval cliffs, topped by matted peat and tussock. The first day is calm, and several sites at the Windward Islands and a main island site at South Bay are investigated.
‘There’s an astonishing difference between sites,’ Smith enthuses, ‘People think of these islands as just whales and albatrosses, but they’re only part of the story — the marine environment sustains everything here.’
Next day the wind begins to shriek from the south-west at a steady 35 to 50 knots, and Tiama anchors at Alert Bay, on the Antipodes’ east coast, while the divers check out more sheltered sites. A new species of coralline, or burrowing anemone, which attaches itself to rock faces is discovered beneath the towering cliffs of Bollons Island. Long tresses of kelp and endemic Antipodes bull kelp surge sinuously back and forth with the omnipresent Southern Ocean swell. Samples of coralline algae, which are good indicator species for environmental change, are collected by the divers.
Water temperature here, 860 kilometres from Bluff, is 7 to 8 degrees Celsius and the inquisitive seals which badgered the divers at the Bounties are absent, though a gang of pups porpoise across the bay to play later at a site near Leeward Island. Two albatross researchers have spent six weeks at a hut on the island, but otherwise landing is by DoC permit only and visitors are rare.
‘There’s a greater difference between sites at the Antipodes; the Bounties have more barren areas which are interspersed with small areas of incredibly abundant niche habitat — but there’s a wider spread of species here,’ Smith reported.
Again the divers reported numbers of gastropods — limpets and bivalves — but no lobsters
and few inshore wetfish.
Finally, after a week of underwater information gathering, Tiama collects the albatross researchers and six weeks’ worth of scientific equipment, personal effects and rubbish, off Antipodes Island. Accompanied by a squadron of soaring Antipodean albatross, she sets sail for Lyttelton.
‘We’ll be back,’ Cooper says. ‘This is a good start — we’re just getting to grips with how things work down here.’
Open Oceans
FOOTLOOSE AND FODDER FREE
One of the most pleasant aspects of ocean-passage-making is practising the ancient sailors’ art of yarning.
For centuries, in countless small ships — mere specks on the vastness of the oceans — sailors have passed the time by telling stories. ‘Gamming,’ as the old sailormen called it, has developed to a fine art at sea, and its practitioners these days are world-cruising yachtsfolk. Circumnavigating sailing ships would back their topsails at sea to take way off, while skippers and crew swapped stories and mail to be sent from the next port o’ call. These days, most of the gamming happens from a distance by email and radio.
Landsmen talk of mortgage repayments, cars, TV programmes and movie stars — but seafarers recall adventures, ports o’ call, boats and shipmates.
Lindsay Stewart and I got into some great gamming during a delivery trip from Rarotonga to Wellington a few years ago. The yacht under delivery, a fibreglass Ted Brewer cutter called Footloose, had been gutted by fire at Suwarrow Atoll, so every time we touched the charred teak interior joinery, we came away smudged with black. Lindsay had built a steering wheel out of steel reinforcing bar and scrap metal to replace the original stainless-steel one which had been stolen, and we had through-bolted 50-millimetre flat-bar steel straps either side of the mast for added strength where the hot aluminium had bulged outwards to relieve the pressure from the rig in the intense fiery heat at deckhead level. The stainless-steel forestay had also been stolen, so we calculated its length from a sailing magazine advertisement while still in New Zealand, and spliced a new one from galvanised wire to get us home. The bottom panel of the mainsail had been melted up to the first reef point.
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