TWO MELBOURNE STEAM TUGS

The first one is a little sad. Lyttleton ll was used by the Lyttleton Harbour Board  in New Zealand's south island and was in very good nick when she was pensioned off 20 or so years ago. She was steamed over to Australia and I tracked her down looking a little second hand in Melbourne. There wasn't anybody around and I heard subsequently that she was available but that there were no takers. She was a Lobnitz tug, a near sister to the William C Daldy in Auckland featured elsewhere in this site. Being built a little after Daldy, she has a more modern stern. I was amazed at how  unbattered her hull appeared when compared with Daldy who really got a hard life with the Auckland workload including ramming the ship Port Chalmers at full speed when her electric engineroom telegraphs failed.

Alas, she was scrapped but a Melbourne group secured the machinery and removed it as the hull was cut up around it. Click on the button below for the story and navigate through collection to Lyttleton 2.

I have a little about the tug's predecessor Lyttleton 1 which is still going great guns in her home port. It is in the Hotchpot (qv).