On New Year's Day 1902 the whole of Christchurch seemed to climb on the trains and come through the tunnel to Lyttelton. More than ten thousand people packed the wharves, the foreshore, the hotel balconies and the sideshow alleys. They had come for the regatta — the rowing, the yacht racing, the swimming. The rowing races had run in Lyttelton since 1851, and the New Year's Day regatta had been the colony's biggest aquatic festival since the railway tunnel opened in 1867.
But on this particular day the wind died completely. The racing yachts lay "idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." So the real entertainment, the thing the crowd had really crossed the harbour for, was the finale.
Somewhere out beyond the moles sat a 30-ton schooner called the Ocean Bird. She had capsized in 1872 and everyone on board was lost. For thirty years the wreck had rotted, and then somebody decided the proper use for her was New Year's entertainment. Captain Falconer and his torpedo corps fitted her out as a target. "She looked a poor, forsaken object as she lay there patiently awaiting annihilation," wrote a reporter for the Press, "but there was little pity wasted on the poor old derelict."
Just after two-thirty a naval cutter went out and drew alongside. A handful of sailors dropped below deck, then scrambled back to the cutter. The ship began to burn — sheets of fire across the deck, smoke so thick it blotted out the hills of Banks Peninsula. For half an hour the crowd watched her burn. The sailing and swimming stopped. People jostled along the water's edge for a better view.
At three o'clock precisely, an electric cable that ran from the breakwater to a mine under the hull did its work. The Ocean Bird disappeared inside a tower of smoke and spray. Thunder rolled across the harbour and the crowd cheered, and cheered again.
This was a tradition, not a one-off. The public submarine explosion was the famous part of the Lyttelton regatta from the 1890s until the First World War, and the town kept buying a condemned ship and blowing it up. In 1908 three mines were wired to blow and only two fired; the third went off as a boat came alongside to recover it. Nobody was hurt by the mines. Later the same day sparks landed on a collection of fireworks on another boat, and the rockets went up while some of the men on board threw themselves over the side.
The explosions faded out before the First World War, but the harbour never stopped sailing. The Canterbury Yacht and Motor Boat Club formed in 1921, its successor celebrated a hundred years of club sailing in 2021, and in 2023 the international SailGP came to Lyttelton. Racing in the same harbour where the town once answered a windless New Year's Day by burning a ship it had already drowned once, and blowing the wreck to matchwood, to gratify "the element of destructiveness which lurks in human nature."
Source
Teuaka