NEW LIGHTHOUSE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 11, 13 January 1934, Page 11

NEW LIGHTHOUSE.

ON BARING HEAD. PASSING OF PENCARROW. WORK STARTS THIS WEEK. . Work on the erection of the new lighthouse on Baring Head, which will ultimately replace the Pencarrow lighthouse, is starting this week. The buildings will include a tower, two cottages for. the keepers, and various outbuildings. The contract time for the job is three months, but it will be some little time after the building is finished before the light is fixed in the tower and functioning. Hence it may be several months yet before Pencarrow's light is finally extinguished in favour of the new one on Baring Head (says the "Wellington Post").

The new light on Baring Head will be considerably higher above sea level than the present light on Pencarrow, and the lighthouse will be a much more up-to-date affair. It will be similar to that recently erected on Cape Egmont, and the lighting apparatus will consist of a revolving lens with a fixed incandescent acetylene burner. The range in ordinary clear weather will be 25 miles, the same as Pencarrow's light.

Tho light will be so adjusted as to be visible eastward from a point two miles off Black Rock, at Cape Palliser, and westward from a point about a railo off Karori Rock, and about half a mile off Tom's Rock and Sinclair Head. Mariners aro agreed that the new light on Baring Head will be much more useful than that on Pencarrow. The latter is well in the bight, and if a large vessel gets too cloee inshore in nn endeavour to pick up the light, and fails, there is every chaiiro of a disaster. The light on Baring Head will obviate this danger. Vessels coming from the Pacific will be enabled to pick it up sooner than they can pick up the Pencarrow light, and vessels from the north and the east will bo able to make the entrance to WellingI ton Harbour in quicker time and with greater safety. The transference of the fog signal to Baring Head from Penwill also be appreciated by seafarers, as it will givo timely warning of danger ahead. Pencarrow's Long Service. Pencarrow's familiar light has been throwing its guiding beams down the waterway between New Zealand's two main islands since the first day of January, 1859, that is, for the last 74 years. " On fine nights and on foul nights, on nights when the sea is as smooth as glass, and on nights when wild and turbulent seas lashed to fury by gales dash against the rocky coast, its serene and " unshaken light has guided the great variety of shipping making u?e of the Cook Strait waterhighway in journeys to and from the port of Wellington. It is one of the dozen lighthouses which in Cook Strait or in the bays opening from it give guidance to mariners, the chain stretching from Cape Farewell at the northern extremity of the South Island, where the red and white rays of the lighthouse there erected give warning of the seven-mile-long sandspit, to the bluff shore marked by the Cape Palliser light at the southern end of the North Island.

Pencarrow was the first of the main New Zealand lighthouses to be built, for in quite early days it was realised that the entrance to the harbour of t"ie capital city should be made safe to mariners. The initial cost of erecting and equipping the squat iron tower, which took the place of a more humble wooden erection, and which is 322 feet above sea level, was . £0422 and fo"rpence, so records state with precision, and that this money and that subsequently spent on maintenance has been money well spent no one will gainsay, for Pencarrow's light must have been tho means of saving many a vessel on dark and stormy nights. The name Pencarrow is redolent of the rocky Cornish coast, the home of many of Britain's seafarers, and it is a suitable one for Wellington's harbour sentinel. The name was conferred by a brother of tho Hon. Moles worth, who, in the early clays, was a member of the New Zealand Company, Pencarrow being the name of the Molesworth Cornish estate.