Rough taste of the sea

Press, 27 November 1982, Page 1

Rough taste of the sea

A- sortie for Christchurch news reporters aboard the fishery and resource protection vessel H.M.N.Z.S..Taupo yesterday brought mixed reactions. As the Taupo left her berth at Lyttelton the visitors’ attention seemed quite good, and even intelligent questions were asked. Closer to the Lyttelton Heads, a different picture emerged. Gone were the notebooks and pens; in their place were handrails clutched by white-knuckled hands, Navy raincoats, and sea-sickness bags. Out of the harbour’s shelter, walls of water pounded the vessel’s, hull. A seasoned seaman would have called it a moderate swell, but to landlubbers the effect was moving..

The crew, mainly regular Navy personnel supplemented by a few from the Royal New Zealand Naval Reserve, were quick to the rescue. “There are only a few sick bags left — you used the last box,” a sailor told one of the reservists. The benefits of. attaining sea-legs became apparent as the Taupo headed about 30 kilometres out to sea where a Russian mother ship was in rendezvous with some of her trawlers in the Pegasus Bay area. The Taupo’s crew demonstrated their procedure of identifying each vessel’s call sign and position and radioing both, with the time, to their control centre in Auckland, the , Commodore Auckland, and the Fisheries Control Centre in Wellington.

The Taupo’s commander, Lieutenant Commander N. T. Byrne, reports that his ship has few problems on her patrols, apart from fishing boats drifting in towards Raoul Island from the north. Yesterday’s visitors were not treated to any of the action that brought the Taupo the reputation of being the first New Zealand fisheries protection vessel to fire shots at a foreign fishing vessel. In March, 1976, the Taupo intercepted a Taiwanese squid fishing vessel, the Kin Nam, about two kilometres inside New Zealand territorial waters off the coast of Waitara. The vessel ignored a boarding party’s request to sail to port at New Plymouth and in. spite of shots fired

across the deck refused to turn back. The Kin Nam was eventually escorted to port by the Taupo after two Skyhawks fired 20mm cannons, ..forcing the fishing vessel to abandon its bid for safety about 100 kilometres off the Taranaki coast. After checking the Russian fishing vessels yesterday, the Taupo’s crew demonstrated their skills in a “man overboard” exercise. For the first demonstration, a swimmer was sent to help retrieve a lifebuoy after the vessel had been manoeuvred back to the point, where the “man” went overboard. The second time, the vessel’s inflatable craft, used for boarding foreign fishing vessels, was used for the retrieval.