MOERAKI SAILS TO-DAY

New Zealand Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 11163, 20 March 1922, Page 4

MOERAKI SAILS TO-DAY

FULL CREW ASSURED. FIREMEN’S TROUBLE SETTLED. As, the result of an unexpected settlement in connection, with the difficulty of procuring seamen and firemen for the Union Steam Ship Company's steamer Moeraki, the vessel will sign on a full crew this morning, and she is to sail at 3 p.m. to-day direct for Sydney. This will come as a welcome, though somewhat belated, development, for about 300 passengers who have been detained about four days at Wellington, as under ordinary circumstances the Sydney boat, would have left here last Thursday. It atppears that a condition of the settlement of the trouble is that new articles are to be taken out for the Moeraki. Therefore those men who have already arranged to proceed with the vessel will have to sign off the existing articles. The crew are to be paid off the articles of the Maheno, which is detained at Sydney owing to a dispute between the ship’s engineem and firemen, and the New Zealand members of the crew are being brought back to the Dominion by the Makura, due at Auckland to-day, and the Manuka, due at Wellington, today. If the Maheno had been recommissioned at Sydney it was feared that none of her complement of New Zealanders, who, it is said, formed the majority of the crew, would have been able to rejoin the vessel.

It is understood that the members of the Wellington Seamen’s Union have decided to man the Moeraki because the New Zealand members of the Maheno’s crew are being brought back to New Zealand.