Residents of the seaside suburb of Mirimar* say they are fed up

It's true. I am fed up with oodles of things but I should concentrate on the matter in hand - derelict ships. The old King Kong ship is quite cool and brings in the tourists who hop out of their mini van on a regular basis to have their photo taken standing in front of it, "I was there".

The other(s) though are just hulks waiting to be sunk, and the sooner the better, here's what Wellington Harbour Master Mike Pryce had to say:

Pryce says it is a nationwide problem in ports because with no local shipwrecking industry it is too expensive to tow them to foreign scrapyards.

The vessels are officially worthless and Maritime New Zealand has granted conditional dumping permits for all of them.

Pryce hopes that by mid September the ships will have gone to a watery grave.

"When they go down, they are going 1.7km down and they will be staying there," he says.

And there are plans for one of the ships, the Venture, to make it a dive attraction.

However, that that too takes time, money, and resource consent.

"If that ship can't get a resource consent sorted out in the next couple of months - then we will sink it like the others," says Pryce.

"the Venture" - I suspect he means the old King Kong boat which isn't actually named Venture ... because that was in a film, and that's not real, and stuff. OR, am I wrong and they changed the name to go tootling (and nearly sinking) to Kapiti during filming?

And finally - there's a Miramar-Mapuia Progressive Society, now isn't that so suburbian of us :-)

* "Mirimar" - spelling from the original TVNZ post, *sigh*