May 2012, Issue 166 - Royal New Zealand Navy

RESOLUTION DECOMMISSIONING
By SLT DAVE JAQUIERY
HMNZS RESOLUTION
Sunday 27 April 2012 sees the end of an era
for the Royal New Zealand Navy.
The day marks the decommissioning ceremony
for HMNZS RESOLUTION, 15 years and two
months after she was commissioned into New
Zealand service in Portland, Oregon.
Her years of service have been characterised
by the continuous hard, unsung work which is
the stuff of any self-respecting hydrographic
survey ship, the role which RESOLUTION was
primarily brought into service for, and so named
to tribute the rich historical ties that name has
with hydrography in New Zealand.
RESOLUTION was named after the second
vessel under the command of Captain James
Cook, RN, on which he visited, and surveyed,
our shores during the 1770s. However it was
not the first of that name in Royal Navy service.
The name RESOLUTION was used by no fewer
than 11 RN ships prior to ours during the course
of almost 400 years, very much the days of
when “ships were wood and men were steel.”
Indeed, during CAPT Cook’s first trip here on
RESOLUTION he was away from home for
no less than two-and-a-half years! Not bad,
considering the ship was cramped at 110 crew
and only 33.7 metres from stem to stern.
On RESOLUTION Cook boldly went where
no man had been before, being the first ship
recorded as having crossed the Antarctic Circle.
It was on return from this achievement that
RESOLUTION first visited New Zealand, sailing to
the Fiordland coast in order to make repairs. Since
he was there, Cook also charted Dusky Sound
and conducted a survey of Pickersgill Harbour
— and it’s even still on the chart, albeit mainly
for historical interest. He also named an island in
the area after RESOLUTION.
Sadly, during the course of his third voyage,
again on HMS RESOLUTION, CAPT Cook was
killed. He was posthumously awarded a coat-ofarms.
In fact, the wavy six-armed star on HMNZS
RESOLUTION’s ship’s crest was copied from it in
honour of the man with whom our ship’s history
is so closely bound.
Before entering service with the RNZN,
our RESOLUTION was formerly the USNS
TENACIOUS, a Stalwart class ocean surveillance
ship. Her class was equipped with a Surveillance
Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS) and
was used during the Cold War for passive
sonar operations. TENACIOUS served in that
capacity for seven-and-a-half years before being
stricken from the Naval Vessel Register and
commissioned into our navy one week later on
the sixth of February 1997.
RESOLUTION was purchased to replace
HMNZ Ships TUI and MONOWAI as the primary
hydrographic survey ship with the secondary
role of acoustic research. TUI’s towed array
was embarked onto the SURTASS winch
on the quarterdeck. The survey technology
was much improved with multi-beam echo
sounders replacing the single beam echo
sounders of MONOWAI.
The arrangement for hydrography in New
Zealand had also changed around the time of
RESOLUTION’s commissioning into the Navy. The
model born out of the “funder-provider split” of
the day placed responsibility for hydrography
with Land Information New Zealand (LINZ)
and the Navy entered into a Memorandum of
Understanding arrangement with them. This
resulted in the Navy being contracted to provide
hydrographic services mostly in support of the
Shipping Lanes project for which RESOLUTION
has surveyed over 75,000 nautical miles. By
current tallies, RESOLUTION has generated over
$80 million of external revenue for the RNZN.
Like any Navy ship, RESOLUTION has proved
her versatility and conducted far more jobs than
solely “mowing the lawn” – although the more
than 1200 days she has spent on the survey
ground certainly attest to her commitment to the
task! During the last few years she has conducted
Fisheries and Customs patrols, represented the
RNZN around New Zealand and New Zealand
around the Pacific during deployments to New
Caledonia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, the
Solomon Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Niue, and parts
of the Cook Island chain. One notable event was
her response to calls for assistance for a shark
attack victim, which is narrated by the former
CO at the time.
14 NT166april-may12
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