Benign, beguiling, a provider, a place of ports, a place to play ... Otago Harbour is many things to many people. In the first of a three-part series, Shane Gilchrist examines currents of history, geology and ecology that run long and deep.
At five nautical miles out to sea, the view from the Port Otago pilot launch Potiki has much to offer.
Two ships are passing, not in the night, but in the steely-grey light of a clear autumn morning. Giving the impression of a respectful smaller sibling, Maersk Brani keeps its distance from Lars Maersk which, at more than 260m long and 36m wide, looms ever larger.
Lars Maersk has attracted several Hector's dolphins, which dart around its bow wave before diving away to, perhaps, join other pods, some of which announced their presence several minutes earlier by taking the form of playful surface-to-air missiles.
A royal albatross, meanwhile, stretches before vacating the area, a few languid beats of its wings leaving ripples on a surface that has quietened in the few days since a storm lashed sea and land with equal disdain.
Still, there remains evidence of that front's turmoil. It is found in the slow, southwest swell that rounds Cape Saunders and slides on towards Taiaroa Head where, met by a sandbar that extends roughly a kilometre and a-half into the South Pacific, it has nowhere to go but up. So, too, does Lars Maersk, its blue sides rolling slightly as it ploughs through the ebb tide flowing out of Otago Harbour.
• Harbouring all kinds of life
Aboard Potiki, all is calm. Having successfully transferred harbour pilot Tony Lawrence off the first ship, then taken him to the larger vessel in a boarding process not dissimilar to a remora approaching a whale, launch skipper Ian McLean swings in behind the Lars Maersk.
It's a manoeuvre that brings into sight the familiar hills of Dunedin and East Otago. It also leads to another impression: the relationship between Otago Harbour and all the people drawn to its flanks over the centuries.
Apparent, too, is the narrowness of the entrance to Otago Harbour. So narrow in fact that strong winds forced cruise ship Diamond Princess and its 2800 passengers to carry on past it the previous week; so narrow that one Lieutenant James Cook didn't even know a harbour existed when Endeavour sailed along the southeast coast of the South Island in 1770.
As dawn broke on February 25 that year, Cook noted: ''This point of land I have named Cape Saunders in honour of Sir Charles [former commander in chief of the British fleet] ... From one to four leagues north of the cape the shore seemed to form two or three bays wherein there appeared to be anchorage and shelter from SW, westerly and NW winds ...''
Cook also drew attention to the abundance of whales and seals and the possibility of safe anchorages in the vicinity. Yet compared with the often detailed information he recorded from more northern parts of New Zealand, his journal entries off the Otago coast made no mention of the neck of the harbour.
In Gaining A Foothold: Historical Records of Otago's Eastern Coast, 1770-1839, its late general editor Ian Church wrote that Cook's voyage, the first European account of the area, resulted in a well-constructed chart and accurate records of wind, weather and sea conditions (and also noted a prominent ''saddle-shaped hill'', on which nearly all subsequent navigators would fix their attention).
Notably, Endeavour had little direct contact with land on its passage south and for some days was blown far out to sea.
Perhaps that also explains the omission of any description of the distinctive rock formations at Taiaroa Head and Aramoana, where striations and scars in the cliffs offer clues into machinations far greater than any European exploration.
About 13 million years ago, a series of eruptions resulted in a ''shield volcano'' that rose about 1000m. However, over the next 10 million years the core of the volcano (known to Ngai Tahu as Rakiriri or ''angry sky'') was eroded.
The result, in short, is Otago Harbour, a drowned river valley that offers various geological relics, including Goat and Quarantine islands which, roughly at the centre of the crater, define the lower and upper zones of the harbour as well as create distinct ecological areas.
Humans and the harbour
Dunedin author, city councillor and environmentalist Neville Peat gazes at these islands from his Broad Bay home on a late afternoon so calm it reveals ''roads of currents'' on the harbour's surface.
If Peat's not looking to the water, he'll probably be searching for all manner of birds, from the eastern bar-tailed godwits that depart Alaska in the northern hemisphere's autumn and arrive 11,000km later on Otago Peninsula, to the royal spoonbills sifting through mudflats with a distinctive sideways motion of their bills, to the various shags that range just above the water's surface (these include the Otago shag, recently identified by University of Otago scientists as a species separate from the Foveaux shag).
Peat also contemplates human interactions with the harbour. Having settled into a chair in his upstairs office, he quotes from Dunedin: A Portrait, one of his various books: ''From encircling hills, an amphitheatre of sorts, the city tends to face the harbour rather than the sea, as if the sea were too much to fathom and less comfortable to live with than a long, sinuous harbour no wider than a large river in places.''
In pondering Dunedin's setting and relationship with Otago Harbour, Peat encapsulates the notion of it as a benign body of water.
Or, to frame the point with a question, would this city (one of the most southern in the world) exist were it not for the harbour? Certainly, it is a provider, a key reason why the Dunedin area has been peopled for more than 700 years, since Maori first arrived on the South Island's southeast coast, enjoying a bounty that included whales, seals, fish and shellfish as well as seabirds and moa.
Archaeologist Sheryl Cawte, of Dunedin company New Zealand Heritage Properties Ltd, points out that radio-carbon dating has documented a process of continuous occupation, notably in the Otakou-Harwood area on Otago Peninsula, that began around 1200-1300AD.
''The head of the harbour is where the really well-preserved sites are. There are a lot of middens containing shells and fish. We've found middens a metre deep and full of cockle shells; the sand there is sometimes stained black and is oily, a result of the fats from the animals they butchered.
''That said, it would have been tough down here. As those food resources became scarcer, you find a transition to a diet based more on shells and smaller fish.''
Within the 500-odd pages of the 2014 book Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History, there is an 1867 lithograph based on a sketch by artist John Barnicoat. It shows a group of Maori at Otakou, bringing to shore a catch of barracouta. Significantly, it also shows several tall ships at anchor, indicating a trend of shared occupation between Maori and Europeans that began in the early 1800s.
As word spread of the sealing opportunities that lay beyond Foveaux Strait in the early 1800s so, too, did the various ships, most of which originated from Sydney. And, as per Cook's observations of bays on the coast, it was not Otago Harbour that initially hosted ships but rather anchorages off the Maori settlements at Long (Warauwerawera) and Murdering (Whareakeake) beaches, where water, wood and potatoes could be obtained.
Although there is speculation some ships may have had contact with Maori on the Otago coast before 1809, only in that year is there definitive information of sealing gangs working in the area, specifically those who came via Brothers, captained by Robert Mason.
The same ship is credited as being the first to enter the harbour, in May 1810. At the time Mason called it Port Daniel, although it was named Otago by James Kelly, captain of Sophia, in 1817.
In an examination of Otago shipping between 1770 and 1860, Opening the Manifest on Otago's Infant Years (2002), Church notes just under 300 ships were recorded as having visited Otago Harbour between 1809 and 1847.
By 1860, that total stood at just under 2000, boosted by the immigrant ships that began to arrive from 1848, which could be regarded as the dividing point between Dunedin's whaling era - exemplified by the Weller Brothers' base established at Otakou in 1831 - and more organised European settlement.
''There was this cultural mix on the peninsula ... a lot of families are still there,'' Cawte says. ''This includes Maori, obviously, but also descendants of whalers.''
The recent Toitu exhibition, ''Life on the Edge: Otago Harbour Communities'', married the history of the harbour with the settlements that sprang up on either side of it: on one edge Aramoana, Carey's Bay, Port Chalmers and West Harbour; on the other side Otakou, Portobello, Company Bay, Broad Bay and Macandrew Bay, among others.
Peter Read, curator of the Toitu exhibition, which finished last month, points out that as well as communities defined by the area in which they lived, there were less permanent occupants, such as the defence workers at Taiaroa Head.
These days, a nature reserve sits atop the tunnels of Fort Taiaroa, which was established more than 100 years ago to counter the perceived threat of invasion from Tsarist Russia. The observation post overlooks part of the royal albatross colony and the fort is now a museum.
''There is also the scientific community centred around the University of Otago's Marine Science Centre at Portobello; there are also fishing communities essentially associated with Port Chalmers. Obviously, there is also the tangata whenua,'' Read says.
''The port is a big part of the story of the harbour. The history of Port Chalmers is closely tied to the shipping companies, in particular the Union Steamship Company, which was the largest private employer in New Zealand at one stage.''
[Nicknamed the ''Southern Octopus'', the Union Steam Ship Company was founded in Dunedin in 1875 and by 1914 the tonnage of its fleet exceeded that of the next five largest Australian shipping lines combined. During its lifetime the company owned more than 300 vessels and was at one time the largest single private employer of personnel in New Zealand. The remnants of the company were liquidated in 2000.]
Planning for the future
Beyond the wire fence that defines the Carey's Bay edge of Port Otago's operations, three teenage boys cast both rods and gazes towards the space between rocks and a wall of ship.
Helped by the tugs Otago and Taiaroa, Lars Maersk performs a slow-motion pirouette as it nears the Port Chalmers basin, the scale and power of the parties involved in the manoeuvre offering a brief distraction from fishing.
Boasting an expected draught at departure of 13.3m, the ship's dimensions match those of recent port arrival Laust Maersk which, with a similar capacity of 4500 TEU (20-foot equivalent units or, in layperson's terms, containers), was the deepest draught container vessel to sail from New Zealand waters since such ships were first introduced 35 years ago.
The accommodation of these larger vessels follows Port Otago's recent completion of the first stage of its ''Next Generation'' harbour-deepening programme to 13.5m. By the middle of next year, the harbour channel will have been dredged to a depth of 14m, enabling even bigger ships to visit.
''The next class of vessel is up to 6500TEU, so we are developing the harbour to handle that,'' Port Otago chief executive Geoff Plunket says.
''We are consented to deepen the channel to 15m, which would accommodate 8000TEU vessels. However, we won't see vessels that big on the New Zealand coast in my lifetime. I think the 14m-deep channel will be sufficient for quite a long period.''
In noting the last major channel-deepening programme was in 1976 (when the container terminal opened at Port Chalmers), Plunket acknowledges the issue of bigger ships is both historic and ongoing.
''In the early 20th century, there was a newspaper article quoting the port engineer, who noted ships would get bigger and the port would need to develop to accommodate them. I could have written exactly the same words a century or so later.''
The highly competitive world of port operations notwithstanding, it stands as fact, rather than any remnant of regional parochialism, that Port Chalmers is the birthplace of New Zealand's modern export trade. Here, in February 1882, the refrigerated ship Dunedin departed with New Zealand's first cargo of frozen meat. It arrived in London 98 days later, the meat still in excellent condition.
These days, meat and dairy account for approximately 62% of exports from Port Otago, which recently posted a half-year (to December) after-tax profit of $5.48 million and expects to pay a yearly dividend of $7.3 million to its 100% owner, the Otago Regional Council.
Although overall shipping calls for the six months to December declined from 235 to 213, a 25% rise in cruise ship visits (91) is expected for the 2016-17 season. This includes the expected arrival on December 22 of Ovation of the Seas which, at 347.7m long, would be 30m longer than any other ship to visit Otago Harbour.
Time and tide
Hoani Langsbury is sitting, talking, at the Caledonian Ground, Logan Park. Once known as Pelichet Bay, it was the second largest salt marsh in Otago Harbour (Aramoana is the biggest) until reclamation work began in 1913.
The significance of the location is not lost on Langsbury, who notes the in-filling of the area (later known as Lake Logan) is just one component of a process that has seen almost 10% of the harbour's original tidal zone disappear.
''This area would have flushed out into the harbour but it has been reclaimed. Waka used to pull up to the shoreline near where the Octagon is; likewise near Rattray St, where the Distinction Hotel (formerly the chief post office) is. That used to be the edge of the harbour. These areas would have been full of flatfish and other kai moana.''
Manager of the Royal Albatross Centre at Taiaroa Head as well as the adjacent little blue penguin colony, Langsbury is a direct descendant of Karetai, who with fellow Ngai Tahu chief Taiaroa signed the Treaty of Waitangi aboard Herald just off Pilot's Beach on June 13, 1840.
Langsbury, who has a bachelor of science degree (ecology, geology) from Victoria University, recently completed a postgraduate paper documenting changes to Otago Harbour over the past 200 years.
His conclusion: what was once an estuary has been vastly altered by a combination of processes, including dredging, the construction of rock walls within the harbour, the mole at Aramoana, reclamation of foreshore ... the list goes on. (An example: the requirements of road and rail - and, previously, horse and dray - have diminished the harbour's natural shoreline by 90%.)Yet, despite all this, Langsbury remains upbeat about the harbour.
''We have all these seawalls ... However, I think some parts of the rocky foreshore environment will recover in about 15 years. The harbour does go back to finding its own balance.''
Langsbury lives close to the head of the harbour, at Weller's Rock. He overlooks Te Rauone Beach where he often sees people catching flounder. About 10 years ago, he says, the only such fish to be found there were juveniles, ''about the size of a saucer ... now we are seeing adults back in the harbour.
''I spend a lot of time at Pukekura, or Taiaroa Head, watching what's happening in the harbour. And our harbour is getting healthier all the time.
''I have three children and we get out a fair bit. My father was lucky enough to win a Coast Guard raffle a few years ago and didn't have anywhere to store the boat he won, so I found a place for it. Every now and then he comes out on it.
''He's an old fisherman from Otakou. He has taken me to places he went 70 years ago and we have pulled up cod from holes he knew about way back then.''
Langsbury pauses. Amid all this talk of change, his next words are age-old, as inevitable and unbending as the tide: ''I can't tell you exactly where."
• Next week: How we see the harbour today.
