Pumps

The pump array in the engine room of MV Cape Don sits between servicing cycles. By the time Brett Patman visited in 2016, the port general service pump had been pulled from its housing for overhaul, leaving the manifolds exposed in place. To the right, the salt water circulating pump and the engine's heat exchanger remained installed, components of the cooling and service systems that supported the vessel's 5-cylinder 2-stroke Polar diesel main engine, rated at 2,000 BHP at 250 RPM. MV Cape Don was built at State Dockyard, Newcastle NSW, with the keel laid in 1961. She was launched on 28 May 1962 and completed in January 1963, one of three Cape Class sisters designed by the Australian Shipping Board for the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service. The other two, Cape Moreton and Cape Pillar, are gone. Cape Don is the only one left, and the sole surviving vessel of the entire CLS fleet. For 27 years the vessel supplied fuel, equipment, stores, and lighthouse keepers to manned stations along the Australian coastline, operating primarily out of Fremantle across the WA and NT coastlines and into Bass Strait. The progressive automation of Australian lighthouses through the 1980s made Cape Class vessels redundant. Cape Don completed her final government voyage in 1990. After a period as a cargo liner between Australia and the Solomon Islands, she was laid up on the Clarence River before being sailed to Sydney and moored at Balls Head Bay, Waverton, at the former Coal Loader wharf. The Coal Loader Complex was added to the NSW State Heritage Register in 2021. The vessel is now managed by the Sea Heritage Foundation and the MV Cape Don Society, maintained by approximately 20 active volunteers. The pump manifolds visible in this photograph are part of that ongoing restoration, machinery mid-process rather than frozen in neglect.