Two of our diver team soon left and another started working with Bob Allen who ran the Pitt Island Packers factory. Later on, Joe Dix took over as manager and he built a hovercraft in the factory during the slack days: that is, until he backed over the cliff on his tractor suffering a long fall to the rocks below.
I was the first there. Until he moaned, thought he was surely dead, but not Joe. He had to survive, as he was responsible for making the icecream at Christmas.
One day I happened to be at Eva and Ken Lanauzes' place at North Head when Bill Barton on the Cascade called up wanting a diver to come and remove a sack caught around his propeller shaft.
I volunteered and went out through swells breaking over a thick bed of bull kelp to his boat. It was like making my way through a tank full of slimy eels.
That was the last time I saw the Cascade because weeks later, while pulling a cray pot off the south end of Pitt Island, the pot got caught on the bottom, the rope jammed on the winch and pulled the boat upside down.
Bill disappeared for ever and it was two or three days before the only survivor, Dave Hearn, was picked up freezing cold in the life raft, fortunately tied to a cray pot buoy.
Later, I used to stay at Waihere at Dutchie and Nell Preece's place. I'd recently been shore diving for pauas at Simians Bay down from their North Head house and during a spell ashore, the dogs' barking alerted me to a seal pup they had found. I thought (and remember I was in my very early 20s) I would make it into a pet to accompany me diving from my 12ft aluminium dinghy.
I took it back to Dutchie and Nell's place where I had it in their kitchen feeding it a mixture of raw eggs and cream through an eye-dropper, very laborious, but the seal seemed to tame down quickly.
Its breath stank to high heaven, and more than occasionally it would bark loudly. Eventually, Nell yelled at me in a loud voice, "Get that seal out of my kitchen!"
I've since learnt that seals often leave their youngsters ashore while they go to sea to feed for a couple of days at a time. The youngsters should be left alone.
Soon after I had a 30ft steel cray fishing boat and used to pot for crayfish around the southern half of Pitt Island. I recall once meeting Ken Pascoe on the Producer off North Head one day who asked me if I'd noticed the bits of seal at the Star Keys islands, where I'd been diving the day before.
He said, "It looks as if the sharks have been at them". At the time, I wasn't greatly concerned.
I've since come to the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that the risk-assessment part of young males' brains isn't very well developed.
Kina Scollay was later hit by one white pointer at the Star Keys and Vaughan Hill by another at Pitt, both only just surviving.
But it was an enjoyable place to dive. The water was always crystal clear. Once under the water, and you'd got your second-breath after a few minutes, it was a real pleasure barrelling off down and picking up a few crays and coming to the surface again.
Often a sudden dark shape would appear out of one corner of your mask, which would cause me to suddenly tense up, then relax as a seal came within three feet like a friendly dog, big eyes looking straight at me, obviously curious as to what I was up to.
One flat calm, bright blue day I recall dozens of seals around me, most with just their heads sticking out of the water, thoroughly at peace with the world.
Occasionally, I used to drop off supplies and mail for cray divers Duncan Somerville and George Garbutt at Glory Bay. My brother Evan and myself anchored one evening in Glory Bay and rowed ashore.
Before we returned to the boat, Duncan said, "Come ashore for breakfast in the morning."
Next morning there was a loud thwack on the hull, and I realised that one of them had fired a .22 to hurry us up.
An interesting place, the Chathams.
Abridged from a story Don Armitage wrote in True Tales of the Chatham Islands.
