Down at the festival Rosie said they came to the festival every year and made time for the Blessing of the Boats and the Tangata Manu Birdman Beach Party.<\/p>\n
The Beach Party had avoided cancellation but had been relocated to Shorland Park and moved to Friday, February 13.<\/p>\n
She said it was a shame the events had been affected by the wastewater discharge.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t feel like the normal Island Bay festival.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sam said she was very disappointed Blessing of the Boats had been cancelled. She said it was what many people came to the festival for.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a big Catholic community so I think it\u2019s really important for them to see that and obviously the Italian side.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kate said the real disappointment was Wellington\u2019s infrastructure.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not the first time we\u2019ve had sewerage going into the sea,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019ve just got to stop making these mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n
She had brought her stepson and his partner who were visiting from overseas to support the local event and they had enjoyed the variety of street food available.<\/p>\n
Leanne said the kids were \u201cbummed\u201d they couldn\u2019t go swimming and the sewage situation needed to get sorted.<\/p>\n
Anika hoped not being able to go in the ocean wouldn\u2019t deter people from coming to the festival, but she said what was going on in the ocean was really sad.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve talked to quite a few people who are really grieving what this means for the creatures that live here for the marine life, for the diversity that we have, that has taken so long to protect,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
For many the water events however weren\u2019t why they came to the festival.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe live locally, so it\u2019s nice to come down and support and come check it out,\u201d said Dave.<\/p>\n
William said he and his family lived just up the street and came down to the festival for something to do.<\/p>\n
He said with a young baby they wouldn\u2019t have gone to the beach anyway.<\/p>\n
Lin from Christchurch and Jan from Melbourne saw the festival advertised and decided to come along.<\/p>\n
The pair had come for a pickleball tournament, which they ended up pulling out of because of injuries.<\/p>\n
Lin said the pair had seen some signs about the wastewater, but it hadn\u2019t impacted their trip at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve just been having an amazing time because Wellington weather\u2019s been great and we\u2019ve just been doing a lot of sightseeing,\u201d said Jan.<\/p>\n
Newest water samples show wastewater had not reached inner harbour<\/p>\n
Wellington Water says the latest results show there is no indication that untreated wastewater has reached the inner harbour.<\/p>\n
The latest water quality tests taken on Friday show wastewater is still discharging into the ocean and people should stay off south coast beaches.<\/p>\n
But it shows there is no sign the polluted wastewater has reached Eastbourne, Petone the CBD or Kilbirnie.<\/p>\n
Some areas where there had been higher readings also looked to be lower than in previous days.<\/p>\n
Wellington Water chair Nick Leggett said today\u2019s results were positive news, but for now the advice is still to stay out of the water.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we will be doing is building up a pattern and a trend from the testing in the days ahead,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy the end of the week we might be in a better position to sort of say with some confidence and provide some clarity, whether or not that can change.\u201d<\/p>\n
Leggett said the clean-up of the Moa Point plant would also continue over the next week.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur hope is that by this time next week, we will have a much cleaner plant which will allow the assessments to start taking place so we can understand what it\u2019s going to take to rehabilitate the plant and get it back operating.\u201d<\/p>\n
People get in touch with marine life at the Bait House<\/p>\n
While people weren\u2019t able to dip a toe in the seawater at Island Bay, also open during the festival was the Marine Education Centre Bait House.<\/p>\n
Visitors were told as they entered that the facility had stopped its seawater intake the night before the wastewater spillage because of the predicted heavy rain.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll our marine life is healthy and happy,\u201d the Marine Education Centre said on its Facebook page earlier this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe dodged a bullet. Many years of operating a tiny aquarium on the South Coast and being in tune with nature as much as possible paid off.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the biggest attractions of the bait house is its touch pool where people could pick up starfish and other critters, and while people were given the option to ditch the hands-on experience if they were concerned about the water, most were still quick to dive in despite the water issues nearby.<\/p>\n
– RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Down at the festival Rosie said they came to the festival every year and made time for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":273627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[73010,19103,1561,3013,28721,5910,273,5131,29891,2514,29890,111,139,69,147,42308,48216,6100,2742,61,154417],"class_list":["post-273626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-activities","tag-attend","tag-bay","tag-but","tag-cancels","tag-due","tag-environment","tag-festival","tag-gibbens","tag-island","tag-krystal","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-sewage","tag-spill","tag-still","tag-thousands","tag-to","tag-waterbased"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}