We have often visited Napier over the past few years invariably ended up at Ahuriri. There at West Quay, on the other side of the narrow road from the many fine eateries lining the quay, lay Twofold Bay. For three years, the 23-metre steel-hulled trawler sat there going nowhere. Tied up, too old to fish, too far gone to sell, she became a familiar and slightly forlorn fixture of the Ahuriri waterfront. Built in Australia in 1966, she had fished New Zealand waters for decades before maritime safety standards finally caught up with her, and she was quietly retired to the dock.
She might have rusted there indefinitely. Instead, she’s now 17 metres underwater, and her best days may still be ahead of her.
This morning, just after 7am, Twofold Bay left the inner harbour for the last time, towed out through the Ahuriri channel while a karanga rang out from the rocks at Te Karaka, the point the old maps still call Perfume Point. By mid-morning she was moored to pre-laid buoys off the coast, sitting quietly in the June light with Mahia faint on the horizon. At around 1:17pm this afternoon, she took her final breath before the sea claimed her. As she did horns sounded from surrounding boats in their last farewell.
The idea behind sinking her was not complicated. Hawke’s Bay’s inshore waters are featureless, a largely flat, muddy bottom that offers little for the fish species recreational anglers and divers most want to find. Crayfish, kingfish, snapper, gurnard, they all need structure: something to hide under, hunt around, colonise. “It’s a bit hard for crayfish to fly up to the surface,” as LegaSea Hawke’s Bay put it. So rather than leave the spent trawler to slowly deteriorate on a dock, a group of people decided to put her somewhere she could actually do some good.
The vessel was donated for the purpose by Napier businessman Rodney Green, and from that gift, the Twofold Bay Charitable Trust was formed in partnership with LegaSea Hawke’s Bay, working alongside tangata kaitiaki Mana Ahuriri and Ngāti Parau Trust. What followed was nearly three years of planning, resource consenting, environmental assessment, and a very large amount of unglamorous volunteer labour.
The volunteers stripped the vessel back to its shell, removing engines, hydraulic lines, glass, hatches and anything else that could harm the marine environment or become a hazard to divers, working to the London Protocol for contaminant removal. More than 500 hours of volunteer labour went into preparing her, with organiser Alex Smith keeping the operation moving forward week after week. In May, six cubic metres of concrete ballast were pumped into the hull. The engines, lifted out through a section of cut deck by crane, were the final major step. One working bee even drew a former skipper and a former deckhand, who turned up to watch and trade stories about the boat’s history, a few of which probably improved in the telling.
The site chosen for the reef sits three nautical miles from Napier Inner Harbour, approximately 400 metres east of Pania Reef. It places the Twofold Bay within reach of two other reef structures already established in the area: the port’s limestone boulder reef to the north, built from the revetment wall dismantled to make way for the Te Whiti wharf in 2021, and Pania Reef itself. The thinking is that three connected reef systems, spread across the same stretch of coast, will together create a significantly more productive marine environment than any one alone.
No explosives were involved in the sinking. Once on site and moored, the vessel was pumped with seawater and allowed to go down under her own weight, settling upright on the sandy bottom in 17 metres, shallow enough to make her accessible to recreational divers and boat fishers. A 100-metre exclusion zone kept spectator craft at a safe distance during the operation, and the harbour master oversaw proceedings on the water.
In the coming months, up to 50 concrete reef cones, pyramid-shaped structures each weighing 1.2 tonnes, will be placed on the seabed around the wreck to help stabilise it and extend the footprint of the habitat. These will add surface area for marine growth to colonise and, over time, draw in everything from algae and invertebrates to baitfish and the larger predators that follow them.
For now, a rāhui is in place over the site while the wreck settles and is assessed by divers for safety. When that lifts, Twofold Bay will be open for exploration, a new dive site and fishing ground for Hawke’s Bay, built from a boat that had nothing left to give, until it turned out she did.
