Owners hunt $l00,000 yacht

Press, 5 January 1987, Page 6

Owners hunt $l00,000 yacht

Special correspondent in Auckland

A disconsolate New Zealander is scouring the Australian east coast for the $lOO,OOO ketch he believes was pirated from its moorings on a midocean reef in the coral sea. ’ > ■ Mr Geoff Norwood, formerly of Tauranga, his American wife, Donna, and daughter, Natalie, aged 2, were sailing to a new life at Mackay in Queensland when their troubles began. On October 26, their 13metre steel-hulled ketch Genesis ran aground bn Kenn Reef, 380 nautical miles from the Australian coast" ■ •. Genesis was undamaged. Blit,, unable to m ove< her, the Norwoods radioed for help and, together with another crew member, were picked up by a container ship bound for Sydney. “We had secured the boat well, lashed everything down and we thought it safest to leave her and Geoff would come back later with a boat to pull her off the reef," said Mrs Norwood speaking from Mackay last evening. The Norwoods were not

impressed with the way the Australian Sea Search and Rescue toM reporters the exact location , of the Genesis, she said. “While we were aboard . ■ the container ship for two days, just about everybody in Australia was told where an undamaged boat loaded with $30,000 of valuables was lying r unmanned,” she said.- : Two .weeks passed before her husband could hire a boat and skipper from Mackay to retrieve his ketch. . The only sign that remained of < the Genesis at Kenn .Reef - was the c; straight scour-line across the coral where .she had been tbwed out to sea — a trail not more than two <?’ days old, . said Mrs Norwood - . - •; Except for the clothes and photographs the Norwoods had taken with them, everything they owned had vanished including the hand tools Mr Norwood would have'used to start a boat-building business. Some of those had been the toots he used 12 years ago to build the Genesis — a single-chine Boro design vessel with centre cockpit* ■ Their dreams shattered,

the Norwoods have spent < several thousand dollars trying to put stone of the pieces back together. They have appealed X. through- Australian yacht'll clubs, and police. Although hope was growing dimmer, her hus> band , was now combing the Queensland and New./® South Wales coastline : • after a possible sighting, / she''said? ' - • a. When he returns next . week, she will tell him of another report, this time-Df . from someone in Western /Australia. •■js In the meantime with '*l the unexpected support of ?.;| the Mackay community, the family has been able - to settle in the coastal i) town which has turned its -Xj attention from a collapsed 11 coal industry to the || ; booming tourist trade. y “The people here have y been just wonderful and $ Geoff has managed to get - 1? some work," said Mrs s Norwood. Mrs Norwood, a seam- i; stress, aged 30, from Saa-’-X Francisco where the 4 couple were married ■■■■•• three years ago, said she had been able to get work while the expensive search for Genesis went X on. ' W