Steering Gear

The steering gear room sits below decks on MV Cape Don, housing the hydraulic unit built by Brown Brothers of Scotland. Electrical signals from the bridge travel down to this space and are converted into hydraulic pressure, which moves the rudder and turns the ship. The machinery is heavy and purposeful, built to work in remote Australian waters for decades without failure. MV Cape Don was launched at the State Dockyard, Newcastle on 28 May 1962, one of three Cape Class sisters designed by the Australian Shipping Board for the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service. The other two were MV Cape Moreton and MV Cape Pillar. The vessel was completed in January 1963 and made her maiden voyage on 29 March that year. She measured 76.25 metres in length with a beam of 12.8 metres and displaced approximately 2,140 tonnes, driven by a 5-cylinder 2-stroke Polar diesel producing 2,000 BHP at 250 RPM through a single Kamewa variable-pitch propeller. Her complement was 39 personnel. For 27 years the vessel serviced lighthouses, lightships, and navigational buoys along the Australian coastline, carrying fuel, equipment, stores, and lighthouse keepers to manned stations across Western Australia, the Northern Territory, Tasmania, and the eastern seaboard. When lighthouse automation through the 1980s made manned tender operations redundant, Cape Don was retired from government service in 1990. She is now berthed at the former Coal Loader wharf, Balls Head Bay, Waverton, registered on the Australian Register of Historic Vessels as HV000208 and managed by the Sea Heritage Foundation. She is the sole surviving vessel of the entire Commonwealth Lighthouse Service fleet. The photograph was captured in 2016.