Yacht Launched At Lyttelton

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30886, 20 October 1965, Page 22

Yacht Launched At Lyttelton

A 32ft auxiliary cutter, the Maris Stella, was launched by crane at Lyttelton yesterday morning.

Mr John Morrison, aged 22, built the cutter at his home in his spare time. It took him two years and a half.

Neighbours, friends, and schoolchildren thronged the area outside the Morrison home at 12 Ripon street, on

Lyttelton’s suburban heights, as a mobile crane picked the 10-ton, white-hulled cutter from the front garden and placed her on a cradle in the street below. One little girl, who had‘ watched the cutter grow from a skeleton, forgot to go to school in her excitement.

Mr Morrison, a carpenter, is employed by a local shipbuilding firm.

Yesterday the newlypainted cutter rode proudly down Oxford street to the waterfront and hundreds came to watch. On the waterfront Mr Morrison’s mother, Mrs E. Morrison, smashed a bottle of champagne over the bows, just before the crane again picked the cutter from the cradle and lowered her into the sea, near the inter-island steamer, Hinemoa. The

launching was watched by hundreds of people.

■For the Morrison family it was a day of triumph, for during John Morrison’s long labours they had given moral and sometimes physical support. The family went for a cruise round the harbour in the Maris Stella. The photograph shows Mrs Morrison naming the Maris Stella.