BAY OF ISLANDS, New Zealand (4 Nov 2007) — It was time for the old navy sea dogs to slip on their sunglasses and turn away from others to hide the tears as they watched their old navy ship scuttled in the Far North during the weekend. Several former members of the ship's company of the navy's last steam warship, the Leander-class frigate HMNZS Canterbury, were allowed back on board the ship as it lay at anchor in Deep Water Cove near Cape Brett in the Bay of Islands on Saturday, waiting to be scuttled as a dive attraction. Two hours later when 8kg of explosive sent the 37-year-old, 3000-tonne ship to the bottom in four minutes, the emotion took over for some. Former navy shipwright Norm Greenall was at the launching of the ship in 1970 and spent most of this year in charge of the project to strip the ship of valuable material and clean it so it would not contaminate the bay. A few seconds after the bow disappeared beneath the surface. Mr Greenall's cheeks were wet with tears. "It's a tough time...huge," he said as he struggle to talk. "It's gone, a whole part of my life," Mr Greenall said. For Opua teenager Lucy Hamnett, 14, the emotions were different. "It was amazing," she said after stomping on the button which detonated the charges. She had won the right at a charity auction. What was she going to tell her schoolmates tomorrow? "`That I sunk a big ship, and I am going to go diving on it," said the young qualified diver. As a young sonar seaman Mark Pirikahu stepped aboard Canterbury in 1984 on his first sea going deployment. "It was my first ship and has a special place in my heart." Mr Pirikahu, now a warrant officer in the navy and Maori cultural adviser to the chief of navy Rear Admiral David Ledson, said it was a sad day to see such a happy ship sink beneath the waves. However, it was better than the alternative of having it cut up for scrap like other navy warships. "It is sad because it is coming to the end of an era but in saying that also it is a good time where the local people are going to carry on in the next era. "It fell like a true warrior." For several moments he stood by himself on the launch Acheron and watched the white water that was left after the sinking. "What a lot of memories, what a lot of fond memories," he said. Like former supply officer Robin Hulford, who served on the 3000-tonne warship from 1975 to 1977, Mr Pirikahu said Canterbury was always a happy ship, right to the end. "You can't take the memories away because the ship is going away." Former Canterbury weapons engineering officer, Andrew Ford now a commander but then a lieutenant commander, took a few emotional moments in the cabin he lived in an hour before the ship was sunk, to reflect on his two deployments on the ship -- from 1997 to 2000 and from 1992 to 1993. "I have mixed emotions. It is personally sad but I don't think it is sad for the navy because it is a fitting way for the ship to carry on doing a service. "It is sad for me. I spent a lot of time here," he said as he stood in his cabin beside the desk he sat at and in the space where his bunk was once fitted. Cdr Ford said a highlight of his deployment was to turn the ship around in 48 hours after it had just returned from a thee-month deployment overseas, to send her back to East Timor in 1999. The ship had celebrated her 29th birthday -- old for any warship -- and needed some urgent repairs before it could leave the Devonport Navy Base in Auckland. On top of the repairs, it took a day to load ammunition, fuel and stores for the 250 crew members. | | The navy's last steam warship now sits in 28 metres of water in the Far North as the country's newest dive attraction. An hour before explosive charges blew several holes in the hull Mr Pirikahu performed the last naval act on the ship when he tied a figure of eight knot in the line holding the electric firing line to the ship. The line stretched 480 metres across the bay to the launch Acheron, where Lucy Hamnett stomped on a firing detonator and the 8kg of explosives blew several holes in the hull. Within a minute the ship began to settle by the bow but as planned, the heavy weight of the engines and gearboxes in the stern soon caused the stern to slip beneath the surface slightly quicker than the bow. Keith Simpson, from the English company Cadre One which was commissioned to scuttle the ship, said he had a few anxious moments when the ship took on a pronounced list to starboard as it sank. However, after three minutes the list corrected itself and the ship sank stern first to the seabed. Half an hour after the sinking Andrew Lumley, also from Cadre One, delivered the news to the Bay of Islands Canterbury Charitable Trust. "The good news is that she is sitting bolt upright on the bottom," Mr Lumley said. Sonar images from a new multi beam sonar detector which was developed in Auckland by Electronic Navigation Limited and which is attracting world wide interest, showed the ship sitting in an ideal position to make it a perfect site for recreational divers. Earlier as he prepared the explosive charges on the ship, Mr Lumley told NZPA they were not interested in breaking the "macho" record by sinking the ship as quickly as they could. "The key is to keep the thing upright and not break it," he said, referring to a weakness just forward of the bridge in Leander frigates which caused others, including the navy frigates Wellington and Waikato, to break in two when they hit the seabed bow first. "It should remain intact which is more important to put it down quickly," he said on the frigate's flight deck a few minutes before the ship was abandoned and the charges were fired. He said the plan was to sink it stern first but to achieve that it was trimmed slightly bow down before the explosive charges detonated. The greater weight in the stern would then take over and the ship would sink almost on an even keel. In preparation, 26 holes were cut in the hull above the waterline and six holes were to be blown below the waterline. He said many holes were also cut in the decks because it was just as important to let air out as it was to let water in. The ship now joined two other navy ships, the oceanographic research ship Tui at Tutukaka and the former frigate Waikato at Ngunguru and the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior at Matauri Bay, as dive attractions which would have international appeal said the Bay of Islands Canterbury charitable trust. 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