Anchor Windlass

The anchor windlass occupies the forward deck of MV Cape Don, a compact but heavy piece of working machinery connected by approximately 100 m of chain to a pair of anchors sitting port and starboard at the bow. A third anchor, a spare, rests on the deck nearby. The steelwork around it tells the story of a vessel that spent decades at sea rather than on display. MV Cape Don was built at the State Dockyard in Newcastle, NSW, her keel laid in 1961 and the vessel launched on 28 May 1962. She was completed in January 1963 and made her maiden voyage on 29 March that year. Designed by the Australian Shipping Board and built for the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service, she was one of three Cape Class sisters, alongside Cape Moreton and Cape Pillar, purpose-built to supply and maintain lighthouses, lightships, and navigational buoys around the Australian coastline. She displaced approximately 2,140 tonnes, stretched 76.25 m in length, and was driven by a 5-cylinder Polar diesel engine producing 2,000 BHP. For 27 years, Cape Don worked the remote stations of the Western Australian and Northern Territory coastlines, delivering fuel, equipment, and stores to keepers at manned lights and conducting maintenance at unmanned beacons. The progressive automation of Australian lighthouses through the 1980s steadily reduced the need for vessels like her, and she was retired from government service in 1990. Her two sister ships were eventually sold. Cape Don is now the only surviving vessel of the entire CLS fleet. After a period as a cargo liner between Australia and the Solomon Islands, and a spell laid up on the Clarence River in NSW, she was sailed to Sydney and moored at Balls Head Bay, Waverton, at the former Coal Loader wharf. The Coal Loader Complex was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register in 2021. Cape Don herself is registered on the Australian Register of Historic Vessels as HV000208. This photograph was made aboard the vessel in 2016, part of the Lost Collective MV Cape Don series captured on a Nikon D7000.