Bird-watcher’s discovery

Press, 7 May 1983, Page 12

Bird-watcher’s discovery

PA Auckland H.M.N.Z.S. Otago has featured in a billion-to-one chance meeting in the midTasman with a lifebuoy which parted company with the ship five months and 1500 km earlier. Commander Rob Eckford said that he could not believe it when a bird-watch-ing chief petty officer reported sighting the round cork buoy while taking part with Australian and United States warships in Operation Tasmanex recently. “We would have missed it

completely if our track had been 30m to 40m either side,” Commander Eckford said. “The odds of a coincidence like that must be astronomical.” He said yesterday that the buoy was lost overboard last November when the frigate was battling a storm in the Great Australian Bight, 650 km west of Tasmania. The Otago was on her way to Fremantle to join other ships in an Indian Ocean exercise. “Then, during Tasmanex a few weeks ago, we were

in the middle of the Tasman, in rendezvous with an American destroyer and H.M.N2.S. Waikato when one of the crew spotted it. “He is a keen ornithologist and was watching birds through a binocular.” Commander Eckford presumed it was a buoy lost from a yacht and was surprised, when the barnacle growth was scraped off, to find H.M.N.Z.S. Otago printed underneath. “We cleaned it up and it’s back hanging where it alwavs was.” he said.