|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
This is the first story in a two-part series on the work of the Auckland Police Maritime Unit, who work aboard the Deodar III vessel.
Among the people and vessels at the Bucklands Beach Yacht Club’s (BBYC) recent public
Open Day was an 18.5-metre-long twin-hulled boat staffed by members of the Auckland
Police Maritime Unit.
According to the police, the unit covers an operational area of about 3700 square kilometres which includes “the greater Hauraki Gulf, the Firth of Thames, and associated harbours and inlets”.
Police say the Gulf has about 200 islands, including ones with residents such as Waiheke
Island, Great Barrier Island, Kawau Island, and Rakino Island. Within that operational area
there are about 5000 craft on swing moorings, 4500 craft in the five marinas and about 100,000 craft on trailers.
The Auckland Police Maritime Unit is comprised of 21 staff, divided into four sections of
five people, including its senior sergeant. One of its members present at the recent BBYC
Open Day is sergeant Peter Comer, who spoke to the Times<ITALICS> about the unit’s
work.
“We’re essentially a police car on the water,” he says. “Whatever a police car does on land,
we do on the water. So it’s traffic management, because it can get quite crazy out there, and there’s crashes and the police’s response. Whatever you get on land, you get at sea.
“There’s a lot of people who live or stay on their boats. We get family harm incidents out
there, we get it all. Maybe not the frequency with which it happens on land, but it still
happens.
“The other thing we do is essential rescue, so any person who gets into difficultly on the
water, on either coast, we run the job. We run it from our base and use the Coastguard or
we’ll be out in our boat. On top of that we support the islands.
“We’ve got police on Waiheke Island and Great Barrier Island, and ambulance staff, so if
police have an arrest, we’ll go do it, and if they require back-up we’ll go do it. And then
you’ve got islands people live on like Rakino and Kawau, so we do all sorts.”Comer says boats can now go a lot further than they used to and are more capable.
“People are going further and search and rescue is going further afield. We’ve got more
people out there, we’re getting more traffic out there, and in New Zealand you can buy a boat of any size with absolutely no knowledge and go boating.
“So that makes it interesting for us too. We get boats running over boats and people who
don’t know the rules speeding, so we do a lot and have a big broad range of stuff we do.”
The Auckland Police Maritime Unit works from its base at the Marine Rescue Centre in
Mechanics Bay, on the Waitemata Harbour. Police say it shares a facility with the Volunteer
Coastguard, Northern Lifeguard Services and Auckland Harbour Masters Office.
“We used to have the police’s Eagle helicopter and Westpac Trust Rescue Helicopter there,
but they’ve since moved,” Comer says.
“They were at the helipad next door. If we have a search and rescue on the West Coast [of
Auckland] we don’t have any police assets immediately available to us. We’ll run the job.
We’ll send Coastguard or we work closely with Auckland Airport crash/fire (Emergency
Service].
