Pelican comes home for a rest

By Alison Kinkade

Docklands recently had an old friend staying beside Shed 2 in Victoria Harbour.  The educational and environmental campaigning catamaran Pelican was here over the warmer months but has just left for more adventures.

Built by Pelican Charters, the 64-foot catamaran, which is used for a range of scientific, environmental and social research projects, has a long history with Docklands.

“We’ve been based out of here for 15 years so we were here before anything was here really,” Captain Garry Mckechnie said.

Mr Mckechnie explained that the company’s original connection with Docklands dated back to the 1990s when the Docklands Authority sponsored one or two teenagers in connection with its documentary film If It Doesn’t Kill You.

Docklands recently had an old friend staying beside Shed 2 in Victoria Harbour.  The educational and environmental campaigning catamaran Pelican was here over the warmer months but has just left for more adventures.

“Following the documentary we realised that we needed a bigger vessel to continue our work and so we approached the Docklands Authority about getting some space in Docklands to build a catamaran,” he said.

“They said we could have Shed 19 free of charge but that we could be kicked out at any time with only 30-days notice. So, I took a deep breath and we moved into Shed 19 and fortunately they kicked us out six years later when we were nearly finished building the boat,” Mr Mckechnie smiled.

The catamaran, which has been berthed in Docklands since December, took almost 40,000 hours to build over six years with four or five people working on it full time.

Mr Mckechnie said he saw himself and the rest of the company as marine educators.

“We’re heavily involved in curriculum development and we hope to take the data from the research and develop it into a school curriculum. It is very important to us as we see it as an opportunity to teach the people of the future,” he said.

Mr Mckechnie said that they recently had an education success story that came out of a program that they ran a few years ago called Be A Marine Scientist For The Day.

“A few years ago we ran this competition for schools and this year one of the students, who came on as a 15-year-old only a few years ago, came on our Two Bays program and is now about to start studying marine biology,” he said.

Mr Mckechnie hopes to continue to educate young people by linking his work to schools.

“We are very keen to link in with schools as much as we can. But we have to find ways of subsidising the work we do and getting it out there.”

The Pelican was berthed in Docklands until mid-April and will return in December.

“There’s a little bit of maintenance work to do as we’ve just come out of two months of sailing,” Mr Mckechnie said.

Mr Mckechnie said he hoped to maintain a presence in Docklands and bring marine education to a wider community.