CONTROL OF PORT SHIPPING

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27191, 7 November 1953, Page 9

CONTROL OF PORT SHIPPING

SIGNAL STATION AT LYTTELTON • BOARD’S SERVICE TO MARINERS Visitors to Lyttelton, often stand on the wharfside and look out across the inner harbour to a 40ft high black and white tower standing* alone on the elbow, of Gladstone pier. Few realise that they are looking at the control centre • of Canterbury’s maritime commerce, for it is from this tower, which houses the Lyttelton Harbour Board's signal station ior shipping, that mariners .receive messages for berthing and piloting instructions. The station also relays messages from ships and maintains a listening! watch for 15 minutes on the hour each hour of the day and night for such messages and distress calls. Another task is to keep a look out during the night for harbour lights to see that all are operating correctly. Movements of shipping inside the harbour are noted, and the log times of vessels arriving and departing through the moles are kept.. The station keeps a list of ships’ telephone numbers other necessary records of the harbour board, and logs the weather. Twice a day, at 9 a.m. and 2.5 p.m., the station goes on the air to transmit and receive messages to and from Ripa island’s caretaker. Until some years ago the island was connected by underwater cable, but this was found to be unsatisfactory and was replaced by the present system. Unlike the three major New Zealand coast stations which are controlled by the Post Office at Auckland, Wellington and Awarua, the Lyttelton station does not pass telegrams, and carries out harbour board work only.

Signalling System Three methods are used to signal ships. One is the international signal flag code, another the Morse lamp, and the third, radio-telephone. The international flag code is, of course, the oldest method and, today, the least used. However, it was not so I long ago that the signalman on duty when sighting a vessel had to rush outside and hoist to the masthead his answers and instructions in reply to vessels’ signals. -Wireless and lamps have practically done, away with flags. A rack of flags is still kept ready for use.

One of the first questions - asked by visitors to the five-storey tower is: “If flags are seldom, used why bother about Morse when you have the radiotelephone?” - The answer is that although it is obligatory for all New Zealand-re-gistered coastwise vessels to be equipped with radio-telephone, overseas ships generally do not have such equipment, preferring instead to rely on wireless telegraphy apparatus, which has a greater range. There are exceptions, among them being the 10,409-ton Port Victor and the 16,969ton Rangitata.

Overseas. vessels do not make contact with the station until they are in sight, and then signals are exchanged with one or the other of two lamps. One is a sin Aldis lamp and the other is a 1000 candlepower 12in lamp, made for use by the United States Navy, which has a range of about seven miles in clear weather. Like the radiotelephone equipment, it was obtained after thfe war from surplus military stocks.

The radio-telephone, apart from one or two “dead spots” (Akaroa is a difficult place to reach, for example) has a range from Puysegur point to Cape Reinga. In exceptional conditions operators have listened to a vessel in the Bass strait arid once,,to an American tuna fisherman near the Galapagos islands plaintively calling, “Can you