Call me old fashioned but progress doesn’t always seem like a step for the better. I’m thinking about the New Wharf, it ‘s been part of the Kaikoura landscape since around 1909 (The Old Wharf is around the corner and wasn’t up to the job of a busy town so the New Wharf was built). For all these years it has jutted out into the ocean amongst the lime rocks braving the forces of nature.
The fishing careers of countless kids have started here, some of them using the wharf to land their catches when they grew up and became fishermen. It has been used for work and play for 90 years.
I spent hours at the wharf and made 100s of images of it and from it. It was a place where you could almost feel the history. The creaking, gnarly planks had weathered a thousand storms, strained under 1000s of tons of cargo.
The Wharf is the first place to see the sun in the morning and the last to loose it at night and I would be there. I would go there in the middle of the day and I would go there in the middle of the night. I would go and watch the angry ocean pummel the poor old Wharf, I would paddle under it on my kayak.
It was one of the most favourite places for wedding images with wedding couples loving it almost as much as me. Standing on the Wharf on a clear day you are surrounded by an ocean of blue sea and sky. On a rough day there was the rustic timber of the decking contrasting with the beautiful people.
But the New Wharf was getting old, the osteoporosis in it’s piles meant it was no longer safe and something had to be done. For months now there have been cranes swooping over the Wharf, picking pieces off it like a shag dismembers a fish. There was just a carcass. There are noises of pile drivers putting in new pieces, the foundations of some concrete pier that Kaikoura is soon to inherit.
I’m sad, I can’t even look now, I don’t want to know what is going on down there and when I drive past I look straight ahead so I can’t see what is happening.
And I can’t help thinking that surely the New Wharf could have got some new legs, a hip replacement or whatever it took to make it strong again. I’ve lost a good old friend.
I made the New Wharf images on Velvia 100 film with my Nikonos underwater camera on my kayak.
Our friend Helen organised the trip, there was to be around 14 keen photographers and we were going to Claverley, just down the coast from Kaikoura. Turned out there was 4 of us and we headed off Friday night and cruised south, over the Hundalees and out to the coast and Claverley.
We found our accommodation then organised our gear and made a few images in the last of the light with some nice Nor West cloud scattered across the sky.
Some dinner, a wine or two (for some of us) and a yarn then we were off to bed ready for an early get up Saturday morning.
Saturday morning it seemed like the middle of the night when we got up, with no network my cell phone said 12.15AM and I was thinking I had been tricked into an early rise. The sky soon lightened and we headed out to the beach to capture the sun rising through the clouds.
It’s an interesting place, there’s the big wild Pacific ocean, the main trunk railway skirts the beach and trains trundle past frequently, there are fences and buildings from another age, trees and interesting rock formations.
Recommended for a photo shoot expedition, thanks Helen.
The slide show is what I saw, in my usual random fashion.
