CARRY ON UP THE RIVER PAEROA MARITIME MUSEUM
Like many motorists I’ve hurtled past, noted the masts, wheelhouses and boat bits, and kept on driving.
But this time was different – I needed to find information on the scow Owhiti and her legendary skipper Jock McKinnon. “They might just know,” I thought.
A group of older men clustered around the reception desk at the front of the crowded old building. “Well,” one of them said, “I think Peter sailed in her – I’ll give him a call.”
Peter duly turned up; a stocky and sprightly senior with a face wrinkled by a life of laughing and seafaring. We had a delightful long yarn about Owhiti, Skipper McKinnon, scows and scowmen. A history he brought out of the books and into life.
Conversation soon gravitated towards our location, the Paeroa Maritime Park.
Centuries before, the first Maori plied the Ohinemuri River in great oceangoing waka long before Europeans arrived, but
