In an email to David price, Ken Robertson wrote:
Ken Robertson – Service in MONOWAI
Navigating Officer 1/7/1975 – 18/12/1979, included Long H Course at DRAKE September 1975 – March 1976 and the conversion in Scotland.
I was also Survey Operations Officer from January 1978 (commencement of survey operations in New Zealand)
Larry Robbins became NO & OPSO and I relieved Dick McBurney as XO.
Executive Officer 19/12/1979 – ?mid 1981 I think Owen Hanley took over from me as XO
Commanding Officer early January 1983 – late April 1985, replacing Gilby George. Mike Lloyd was XO, Ian Martin Navigator & Mak Sew Wah then Rod Davies were the Survey Operations Officers.
Relieved by Ray Gillbanks as C.O.
Commentary on time served in MONOWAI
Conversion voyage to the UK ( I guess we called the voyage to UK the Conversion Voyage & the return voyage home the Delivery Voyage). It was as though they were two different ships, the old going to be rebuilt into the new.
What can I remember from 27 years ago??
We sailed from Auckland sometime in July via Suva Fiji, Pearl Harbour Hawaii, the Panama Canal with a stop at the US Naval Base, Rodman and finally to St Johns Newfoundland then on to Greenock, Scotland, arriving early (11?) August. I dont know now why we were scheduled to go that way, but it did seem a strange way of getting from NZ to UK. No doubt the range of the ship and availability of fuel stops had something to do with it.
We loaded some scrap metal as ballast in the forward holds to try to give the ship a respectable draft forward, but it was never enough and didn’t really work. We also shipped some small arms and ammunition to Suva for the Fijian Defence Force. I had inadvertently miscalculated the passage time from Suva to Honolulu by one day but fortunately we slowly made it up over the passage with a little bit of extra speed so no one really knew except the CO and XO Bill Jaques who gave me a bit of a hard time about it. No Satnav on the outward voyage so it was traditional celestial navigation all the way.
MONOWAI was in light ship trim for the whole passage and bounced around in any sort of sea – her flat bottom didn’t help. For a naval vessel MONOWAI looked pretty disgusting in her appearance. She had been laid up at the Naval Base for some time as Moana Roa in her rusty light green livery, given a quick coat of grey paint and that was about it. Needless to say time underway at sea quickly removed a lot of the paint and by Pearl Harbor she was looking particularly shabby.
Regardless the US Navy accorded us their usual welcoming ceremony; band, hula girls, lots of brass and the lei for the bow of the ship. They must have quietly wondered to themselves what this ‘dirty old tramp steamer’ was really all about! I dont know about anyone else but I recall being rather embarrassed.
I also recall a bit of a wild officer’s run ashore in Honolulu. In 1975 modern style Blue Movies were all the rage it seemed and there was nothing bigger than Linda Lovelace starring in Deep Throat. the Captain (Bubbles Munro) lead the push, no excuses accepted and ‘most’ of the ship’s officers attended the screening plus a lot more that I wont go into here. While the RNZN was a regular visitor to Pearl Harbor with the frigates joining the US Pacific Fleet workup group the same could not be said for RNZN Surveyors and I suspect Bubbles was making up for lost time!
At each port visit the Captain wanted the ship tidied up, rust removed and new paint applied. This I recall caused some heated debates between him and the XO for all the ‘right’ reasons. We were on long passage legs with a small ships company, port time was minimal enough for some R&R, our ultimate destination was a shipyard for a major conversion job and we didn’t have the gear onboard anyway. The different approaches to ‘matters of appearance’ were interesting to say the least. I’m sure Bill may have more to say about that aspect.
The whole trip was a long somewhat tedious affair with the majority of the ships company in a short watch system so it was really a matter of getting from A to B as quickly as possible. I recall the engineers did a marvellous job keeping the somewhat neglected main propulsion system together and operating as efficiently and effectively as possible. We basically motored as fast as possible – 12 – 13 knots! John Westphall was the engineer. Larry Robbins & Ian Martin were the other watchkeepers. Tony Bullock was the Pusser, he also had a BW Ticket – but he was staying on for the conversion (like John W) so you have to suspect it was just a cheap way for the Navy to get them to Scotland. Also onboard for the voyage was Lt Cdr Ces Noonan RNZNR – borne mainly for social duties; e.g. to keep Bubbles occupied & entertained, no easy task. Ces was ultimately gong to UK to attend a reunion of North Atlantic/Russian Convoy veterans. So all in all there were eight officers onboard! We had a pretty experienced team of technical senior ratings too which probably explains why the machinery held together so well for the duration. Looking at the photo I have of the ships company we had 13 senior ratings and 30 junior ratings.
We monitored the US Navy weather routing system for the passage from Honolulu to Panama diving away SE to pick up the East going North equatorial current and made very good time on passage to Panama. The Panama transit was interesting although i had been through before in WAIKATO.
Once clear of the Caribbean and heading North we had the benefit of the Gulf Stream for most of that passage and again made good time. I recall there was the active remains of a hurricane out in the mid Atlantic which kept heading North. This caused us some consternation about when to leave St Johns. I seem to recall we may have delayed departure a day or two. In the event we just had a rolly polly ride with a mainly Westerly wind from astern, choppy sea and a quartering swell across the Atlantic to Scotland.
I recall as we arrived off the Mull of Kintyre, or it may have been the entrance to the Clyde I called up the port radio station announcing our arrival as New Zealand Warship MONOWAI. Several times I did this without a reply. By the time we did get a reply we were immediately abreast of the station about 2 miles away on the coast. Eventually this Scottish voice said something like “warship calling …… I still cannot see a warship in my vicinity, over” . To which we replied have a closer look out your window. No way was the operator going to believe that such a shabby looking merchant vessel was a warship!
A very few days after arriving the ship was put in the hands of Scott Lithgow Ship Repairers, the members of the NZ overseeing team set up shop in their allocated offices, got their families settled in and the rest of the ships company returned to NZ. My family arrived too and I bought a car and we set off South for six months at DRAKE in Plymouth. About seven months later in March 1976 I went back to Scotland expecting to find the ship conversion at least one third if not more, completed. How wrong that turned out to be.
The conversion actually dragged on for another 18 months. There were two reasons. Moana Roa was in a very much worse structural condition than had been anticipated back in NZ , particularly one side of the hull where the lighters in the Cook Islands had rubbed away at it all those years and in the main engines where the blocks were badly cracked and wouldn’t stand the intended uprating in horsepower. And also because the shipyard workers all knew this was their last job, the yard was going to be closed down and they were hell bent on making the conversion last as long as possible.
Two incidents I recall were the fire in the junior rates dining hall servery and when afloat in the huge dock (built for the trans Atlantic Queens) efforts to sabotage the dock gate. Our own engineers had the measure of the latter with a contingency plan to operate the gate themselves if need be. Following our pretty extensive HATS & SATS we eventually took the ship over in a somewhat unfinished state; e.g. the decks weren’t completely painted & set sail for Portland. We did a mini safety at sea work-up at Portland which was good value but something of a culture shock for a brand new ships company.
I well remember some of the amazed looks on the faces of the RN staff & sea-riders when they first saw MONOWAI & stepped onboard. If you looked at MONOWAI from bow on half of her appeared to be fo’c’sle, 3 of 4 sets of davits were empty and the external painting was incomplete. Then there was the cabin accommodation and excellent recreation spaces for all the ships company, wide passageways & generous headroom throughout. A bit of an eye opener for the RN grey navy types.
Where LACHLAN had been a sleek racey looking survey ship but with minimal equipment MONOWAI was high & squat, very well equipped and internally far superior. Almost a sedate working platform – but more on that later.
Portland was followed by an truly outstanding visit to London. I say that for several reasons, both as navigator & personally. I got to con the ship all the way up the Thames, a pilotage of several hours, to Tower Bridge which was opened for us about 1700 (with all the traffic halted on either side) so we could berth on HMS BELFAST. We also visited Amsterdam after an interesting pilotage up the Imuiden Canal – I just dont remember now which order they came in.
Sometime in November(?) the visits and social activity came to end and it was time to set sail for New Zealand via the Suez Canal and calling at Gibraltar, Bombay, Singapore and Cairns. The Gib to Bombay leg was a long one only broken by the Suez transit at night. I enjoyed that as the canal pilot basically left me to get on with it – it brought back some memories of going the other way in ’66 in SANTON – but the burnt out/shot up armour still around on the banks was a bit of a sobering sight.
We were at sea for Christmas coming South out of the Red Sea & I recall passing a Russian destroyer at anchor on that day as motored past Aden. We entertained ourselves “as best we could” on Christmas Day – surveyors are definitely used to being at home on leave then! Christmas carols were performed by a group of senior ratings touring the ship ‘dressed’ in sheets (a pretty ugly looking bunch actually). PORS ‘Fish’ Haddock was one of them but he had got a bit caught up at the senior ranks bar beforehand & he had to do the singing tour with the bars brass foot rail handcuffed to his ankle (by some wag of a messmate when he wasn’t looking). We spent New Years Eve in Bombay where again most of us celebrated onboard in preference to being ashore there at night. We had a bit of a chummy merchant ship berthed ahead of us loaded with sugar & I do recall some antics in the sugar by some. Mind you there were also some antics onboard MONOWAI that probably shouldn’t be documented. I dont believe the CO or XO (who were both ashore) know about them even today!!
The rest of the delivery voyage was pretty uneventful in comparison and the weather was pretty fair coming South across the Equator into a Southern Hemisphere Summer. We had a bridge full of electronics, both for general navigation but more particular for surveying and we spent many long hours becoming familiar with all its little foibles. The computerised HYDROPLOT system was a huge leap forward from surveying by steam in LACHLAN to precision positioning, computer controlled plotters, electronic echo sounders & digitised depth sounders, magnetic recording tapes & electronic ‘inking-in’. Quite a learning curve for all of us. But more on that later as we enter the first NZ survey offshore in the Bay of Plenty late Summer 1978.
The arrival of MONOWAI as the RNZN’s new survey ship meant one thing for the surveyors. Suddenly all those rugged offshore & remote coastal surveys that perhaps were avoided by LACHLAN in her later years suddenly came to the fore! Much time spent in Foveaux Strait, Cook Strait, Fiordland, the Sub Antarctic Islands & around East Cape – amongst many other places far & wide!