Ex-queen waits to go to sea again

How many people in the GEIC would recognise this wooden ketch which is lying in Bougainville’s Anewa Bay? Few perhaps because she’s been re-rigged since she sailed in and out of the Colony’s ports. She’s the Kia Kia , once the Queen of the GEIC fleet, now owned by Bill Culver, who works on the Bougainville project. Her name in Gilbertese means White Love Tern.

Built in Hong Kong in 1938 as a Marconi-rigged ketch of solid teak, she served as a general administra tion and dispatch vessel for the GEIC Government.

When the Pacific War broke out, Kia Kia was in Fiji and so escaped capture by the Japanese. She was used by the Fiji RNVR as a supply ship until war’s end when she returned to the GEIC.

Found to have dry rot, her teak transom mast and stern were removed and replaced by Fiji kauri, and she was re-rigged as a gaffed ketch. Declared redundant in 1960, Kia Kia was bought by Tarawa resident Simon Edwards who used her as a general trading vessel and also gave her a job few ketches have had—as a travell ing cinema, showing films up and down the Solomons.

Bill Culver bought her in 1971, re-rigged her and hopes to take her back to sea again this year—perhaps even back home to the Gilberts.