A major expansion planned for Opua Marina will further change the foreshore where Nancy Greenfield and her sister Myra Larcombe lived and played in the 1940s and '50s.
The sisters contributed to local maritime history through a journal they began compiling as schoolgirls.
They ended up recording every ship and crew member that called into Opua between the wharf's re-opening in the mid-1950s, having been closed down during World War II, and its demise as a freight port in the 1990s.
The result of the sisters' hobby is two ringbinders bulging with photographs, crew signatures, news clippings and mostly hand-written notes detailing each vessel's tonnage, length, cargo and destination, now in the care of the Voyager Maritime Museum in Auckland.
Their family home overlooked Opua wharf, and their father was a harbour board member and contractor, and the founder of the famous Bay of Islands Cream Trip.
Mrs Greenfield has photographs dating back to the 1940s and 1950s, taken from the same angle used in more recent photos showing the marina today and intended expansion. "They show the prominent bluff above the wharf at Opua point, which was flattened to make way for milk powder warehousing and access to the site the marina is now."
The spoils were used to fill in a nearby lagoon.