It has been a few months since our last update. The festive closedown period took a chunk of time in terms of project progress, and the Trust has been focusing on fundraising. We are delighted to announce that the Lottery Grant Board has contributed $250,000 towards the rebuild - that is HUGE and we thank them heaps.
Construction is going well - it is great to see progress. Everyone is enjoying watching the crew doing their mahi nui (hard work), with the barge an ever-moving feature of the landscape along the jetty. In line with our resource consent, there is a dedicated look-out person for marine mammals (e.g. dolphins) when they are piling through the water column. If there are marine mammals close by, they stop piling until the animals have moved on.
Piles have been installed for well over a third of the length of the jetty. As I write, they are poised to install the decking and handrails along the first part of the jetty, including the landward platform. This means the first part of the jetty will look like a jetty! In the next couple of months, they will continue to put in piles and build the sub-structure, using the old jetty for storage and access.
Once the piles are in and most of the sub-structure is in place, they will remove the old jetty. The plan is for this to happen throughout May 2023. We have a laydown area in Teddington. Our amazing volunteers will sort through the timber for sale - we don’t want anything to go to landfill! We have a list of people interested in buying timber - email us at savethejetty@gmail.com if you want to be added to the list.
This is an historic project and we want the workers on the jetty to know how special their work is to our community. When Dyers Pass Road was being built in the 1800s, John Dyer and other Governors Bay community members provided free meals to the construction workers.
So, we have taken a leaf out of the history book. Every Friday, someone is taking morning tea (sandwiches, cakes, home-baked or shop-bought, whatever) to the jetty workers. Drop off is at 10am. We have a roster - it’s full until mid-April, but email us if you’d like to be added to bake at a later date.
And now to the $3.5 million question - when will the jetty be open? We anticipated it would be by Easter (first week of April). However, like all good projects where you do the job once and do it right, that date has changed. We are now looking at a completion date of mid- to late-June 2023. This gives us a bit more time to raise the $500,000-ish still needed to pay for the rebuild.
