The 10-minute long, port-to-port service between Portobello and Back Beach, Port Chalmers, is scheduled to start on October 1 and is the first in more than 60 years to ply the harbour.
Rachel McGregor, the skipper of the delightfully named MV Sootychaser, took the first fare-paying passengers across the choppy waters on Thursday last week.
The service will have two crossings to and from Port Chalmers each day. Once it gets under way it will be a boon for cyclists wanting to make the most of cycleways on both sides of the harbour, and for cruise-ship passengers from Port Chalmers wishing to get to the peninsula more directly than at present.
The Elsie Evans operated the last ferry trips between Portobello and Port, but finally weighed anchor in 1954.
Who remembers going on the old ferries across the harbour? Please send in your stories and any photos if you have them.
Rabbiting on
Natalie Wilson sent in one of today’s photos with the following explanation.
"Your story on rabbits today reminded me of a photo I have of my grandfather, Jack Davis.
"It was taken at R.S Black’s rabbit-skin depot in Moray Pl in June 1938, on the occasion of a record export.
"My grandfather went on to become a wool-classer for Wrightson’s and often worked in the Tarras area."
Thanks Natalie. It’s a highly evocative shot, enhanced by the old sellotape marks, folds and scratches.
Hardy plants
Now for an interesting yarn from Helen Davies, of Ravensbourne.
"Since you posted that long-living pot plant [a more than 60-year-old cyclamen], I thought you might be interested in this true story.
Helen Davies’ hardy leucodendron cuttings still sit in a vase on her Ravensbourne kitchen windowsill, more than six years on. Photo: Helen Davies
"In late August 2012, our family congregated at the Lake Ohau Lodge to celebrate my parents’ 80th birthdays. None of us are from the Mackenzie Country, but it was central to the scattered family.
"We have fond memories of ski weeks at Lake Ohau back in the 1970s — the rope tows, the nutcrackers, the rough and scary mountain road that the Land Rover had to reverse-forward-reverse to get up the last few zig-zags and, for me, the loud, bald middle-aged American tourist and his wife who joined me and my brothers (aged 10, 12 and 15) at the hotel breakfast table. He put marmalade on his egg!
"I digress. After the party, Mum and Dad came down to see us at our new house in Dunedin. Dad was a great plantsman, of Duncan and Davies stock (his father, Mr V. C. Davies, was knighted for his services to horticulture).
"My garden was given a major ‘dad-refurbish’, aka haircut. He had the knack of standing at one edge of a garden and pointing to what needed to be root pruned and shifted, what needed to be pruned at the ankles, what needed to be reshaped to show its best features and what could be on the list for the next time we went anywhere near Wal’s in Mosgiel.
"The prunings from my leucodendron ‘Jester’ were put in a vase on my kitchen window sill. They lasted and lasted.
"In May 2013, they still looked bright and fresh, so they went with Dad in his casket to be repurposed as fertiliser for the giant rhododendrons he had planted at the Waipahihi Botanic Reserve in his hometown of Taupo.
"Come September 2013, I pruned the ‘Jester’ once again, and put some more in the vase on that south-facing kitchen windowsill. Every now and then I add a little tap water.
"Once, a few years ago, I gave them a dose of liquid fertiliser. There is slimy stuff all down the underwater stems and one small root. Two have some little shoots from two years ago.
"Five years have passed. There are a few brown tips but they live on. Every September I marvel and wonder if they will hang in for another year.
"Is it testament to the toughness of leucodendrons, or to the nice even temperature of my window sill? That ‘even’ should probably read ‘cold’, ‘always cold’, ‘never any sun’ — but what a fantastic view we get from Ravensbourne."