Fascinating
Facts & Features

We stayed at Cable Bay Holiday Park for 6 days over Christmas 2024 and were fascinated to find these items framed up on the wall.

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Cable Bay was originally named Schroeder's Mistake, after a cutter breached on the rocky bar, but renamed in honour of the first telegraph cable from Australia to New Zealand which came ashore there, and opened for public business on 21 February 1876. 54 telegrams were received and 93 sent that day. The following day direct cable news from Britain appeared for the first time in New Zealand newspapers. The cable remained New Zealand’s sole international telecommunications link until 1902.

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In March 2001, Telecom installed a 200 km long submarine cable system between Cable Bay and Hokio Beach near Levin. The cable has 24 fibre-optic strands with no intermediate repeaters and provides a communications cable between the South Island and the North Island that is physically diverse from the existing Cook Strait communications cables. ​

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