Last weekend the frigate Wellington was sunk off the south coast of the Wellington to become a reef for divers, but it's been a long journey to the bottom of the sea.
The frigate Wellington, once the pride of the British and New Zealand navies, soon to be the capital's latest tourist attraction.
Wellington began life in britain in 1968 as the Royal Navy's HMS Bacchante. In 1986 the New Zealand Navy bought, refitted and renamed her Wellington.
In 1999, Wellington was retired, this once proud vessel bound for the scrap heap.
Her reprieve came in the form of one man, Marco Zeeman, a Wellington engineer and entrepreneur.
"It probably would have gone to India and pulled up on the beaches there and cut up as razor blades and reinforcing rods, which would be a crying shame," he says.
Zeeman, as you'll soon realise, is an ideas man, and this was his idea for the old warship.
He reckoned he could bring Wellington, the frigate, to Wellington, the city, sink it off the rugged south coast and turn it into a reef for divers.
"I thought crikey there is no way Wellington should go to Taranaki, or Gisborne, or the South Island, you know its Wellington's ship and it had to come home," he says.
But when Zeeman found the 3000 tonne warship, pennant number F69, she was gathering rust alongside the Devonport wharf in Auckland.
What would she be worth as scrap? Zeeman thinks close to $700,000.
"Compared to maybe $7.5 million dollars a year income into the region, I think its a good investment," he says.
And he bought if for a dollar from the government.
The government let her go for a bargain basement price because Zeeman was planning a much bigger bang for his buck.
Sinking the Wellington is a $1.5 million project run by a charitable trust.
And it's been a six year grind of lobbying and negotiating for permission and resource management consents to send this old lady to the bottom of the sea.
"I must say the excitement's building actually. It's all been a bit of a blur, the last month, but seeing her like this& the emotions are starting to happen& wow &we actually own a warship...it's pretty cool," Zeeman says.
Hundreds of kilometres of wire and cable must be removed to make it safe for divers to explore. Even the very heart of the vessel is being gutted.
"This will be where the real hard work starts from day one, when she arrives in Wellington, take the heads off the engine and get rid of all the snags and make it safe for divers to come through here.
"With the water flowing through here you're going to end up with algae and stuff in here and before you know it there'll be schooling fish living in here. It's going to be pretty neat," he says.
But not everything will go. The guns will stay, this old warship saw service in the Falklands war and patrolled the Arabian Sea enforcing the trade embargo on Iraq.
Artificial reefs have been created all over the world from old warships. Machines that were built to kill now put to use attracting sea life and bringing in millions in tourist dollars.
Zeeman says the spin-offs are huge.
"At least 15,000 divers a year, which have to be catered to by dive shops who are already buying new boats, so the impact is already occurring. Jobs will happen around that, cafés are going to get busier, divers come out very hungry... the diver is a high spend tourist and a long stay tourist, it's great," he says.
But not all locals are as excited as Zeeman at the prospect of having a frigate in their backyard.
"It sets a terrible precedent for any marine reserve, if they let them sink a pile of junk in it," says Nick Dryden.
A sculptor, a former fisherman and diver, Dryden is a long time resident of Island Bay and is vehemently opposed to the Wellington being sunk there.
"Well it's obvious its going to be destroyed by the storms in pretty short order," he says.
"We do get 14 metre swells out here at least 3 or 4 times a year, and this five storey tin-can is going to be 4 metres under the surface proudly facing into the waves. I mean how long can it possibly survive?"
Zeeman disagrees, saying once they hit the seabed, they stay where they are.
"Evidence around New Zealand, and we've got hundreds of old shipwrecks that have slowly disappeared into the sand, and that's what they do, they go downwards not outwards," he says.
But all resistance has been futile, Wellington's home and is officially open to the public. She's now put to work as a floating museum.
