Owning the Porangahau shipwreck: 'It belongs to me, not that it's a lot of use'

On the wild rugged beach of Porangahau lies the bones of the Schooner Maroro, a sailing ship which ran aground on a stormy morning in October nearly a century ago.

At 4.15am on October 24, 1927, the ship crashed on to the Blackhead Reef and finally came to rest on Porangahau Beach.

All efforts were made to refloat her, but on November 27 the ship was officially declared a wreck.

A court of inquiry was held at Napier on December 2, 1927, where Captain JW Jones told the court the weather conditions forced him to shelter near Blackhead.

The court found that the Maroro was beached through the stress of weather, with no evidence of any fault of the captain or the first officer.

But Porangahau resident Gretchen Hunter was told that the ship was deliberately driven on to shore.

"There are all sorts of stories. My late husband's father Jim said that it was driven on to ground because it was the last of the wooden hulled ships," she said.

"Steel hulled ships were becoming heavily used compared to the wooden ones, so it's thought that they wanted to get rid of the Maroro and drove it into shore" she said.

Her late husband John, who would have been 87 this year, used to play in the wreck as a child with his father eventually purchasing it.

"John's father (Jim Hunter) bought it and the ship's bow tank is actually one of the tanks down at our woolshed.

"When John was young, the wreck was fully intact, but one of the swaggers had a fire and did away with the decking."

The Schooner Maroro was a three-masted sailing ship weighing 230 tonnes. Built in Whangaroa in 1904, she was 38.4m long and 2.28m deep. She was owned by Maroro Shipping company and often carried timber or coal.

She was known as the missing ship due to the number of lengthy passages ... so lengthy in fact she was posted as "missing" several times, once taking 31 days to travel from Gisborne to Sydney.

One of her last voyages in 1926 saw her leave Newcastle for Gisborne with a full cargo of coal, with the trip lasting 45 days.

She was later reported missing again in 1926 sailing from Gisborne to Sydney, finally staggering into the harbour after 55 days, with crews resorting to survival on one-third of their usual rations.

The schooner Maroro's reputation of disappearing still remains, with Hunter saying she can be a little hard to find due to the wild nature of the beach.

"The wreck is quite exposed at the moment because of the high tides, but sometimes it can become completely covered over with sand and can be quite hard to spot," she said.

As the years crumbled by so did the ship. All but her ribs now remain, as people slowly picked away at her during the 92 years she's rested on the beach.

"I know someone who's made a coffee table out of it," Hunter laughed, "it's great wood."

Swaggers (rural workers) also called the wreck a temporary home when travelling along the eastern coastline.

"They trekked up and down the coast in those days and they would go to the farming stations, Porangahau Station was one of them.

"They would be given new boots and tea and they would do odd jobs around the place and then travel to the next destination, that was their life."

After the death of her husband, the remains of the wreck now technically owned by Hunter, something she had never actually acknowledged until asked about it in an interview for this story.

"I don't think people ever acknowledged that Jim ever bought it," she said.

"He didn't ever sell it, so I suppose it belongs to me probably, not that it's not a lot of use, I'd never actually thought about it before," she laughed.