Cruises in tug for Akaroa holidaymakers

Press, 29 December 1980, Page 6

Cruises in tug for Akaroa holidaymakers

By NAYLOR HILLARY The hoot and growl of a powerful steam whistle is echoing round Akaroa Harbour this week as the tug Lyttelton runs pleasure cruises there for the first time. '

Members of the Tug Lyttelton Preservation Society took the tug from Lyttelton to Akaroa on Boxing Day. The" society is running afternoon and twilight cruises for holidaymakers as part of its campaign to keep the Lyttelton in going order. ..• With brass gleaming, the bld lady is looking her best, in spite of being 73 years old. Members of the society provide volunteer crews-.—-it takes 16 to man the ves? sei and the galley — and the ship can carry up to 150 passengers. Passengers enjoy being able to go almost anywhere in: the ship, including the engine room. The tug’s boilmetres in diameter, is fired by four furnaces. Stokers feed the furnaces by hand and the fires take up to a tonne, of coal an hour. The tug cruises at eight knots with the engines turning over at a stately. 70 revolutions a minute./ The tug’s builders, Fergu-

son Bros, Ltd,'., of Glasgow, have supplied ~ the original report of the' vessel’s sea trials when she was built in 1907. On her trials then, before the Lyttelton-.Harbour Board took delivery, the tug reached a speed of almost 13 knots. '

When the weather is suitable the tug’s t skipper, Mr Doug Brown, is taking cruise parties-/out through the Akaroa Heads as far as the towering cove known .as the Amphitheatre and v the Spyglass Reef.- Blasts on the tug’s whistle ’ bring resounding echoes, from the high cliffs. 'h‘ t-

Passengers get a glimpse of. the new Akaroa lighthouse on the eastern head Of the harbour and the tug noses' into Haylock Bay where' the materials to build the first Akaroa lighthouse were landed more than a century ago. .< ■ n ' The old lighthouse, commissioned in : 1880, has recently been moved to a prominent point close to Akaroa. The kaiiri lighthouse is still' sound."i Fittings are being restored, its huge lenses are being cleaned, and eventually its powerful beam should be shining again over the harbour.