The Napier Aquatic Centre

By Jane

I have a little nitpicky issue to bring up here. It could be considered silly, but I'll post it nonetheless. It's in regards to my favourite (you know, as in least favourite) swimming pool in the world: the Napier Aquatic Centre, formerly known as the Onekawa Aquatic Centre. They've changed their name and they have a new website, on which they lie.

Above is their page regarding the clubs that operate at the swimming complex. You'll notice that they've included some nice pictures of the pool. The problem is, the two impressive underwater shots on either side of the charming hawk cartoon are of the bottom of the pool at the Wellington Regional Aquatic Centre, two hundred miles away.

This shot clearly shows one of the WRAC's bulkheads, which separates the 50m pool into three sections. You can also see one of the WRAC's underwater viewing windows, of which the Napier Aquatic Centre has... well, none.

Here, you can see the sharp drop-off where the WRAC's 2m deep portion descends to a 10m deep diving well.


The Napier Aquatic Centre is a horrible complex, where I suffered every ill effect of over-chlorination, poor water quality and dreadful management from 1999 until 2002, when I moved to the United States. Before living in Napier, I trained at the fantastic facilities at the WRAC in Wellington, staring at its colourful tiles for four years and many hundreds of kilometers. I'm pretty well versed in what constitutes the bottoms of both those pools.

How cute of Napier to show someone else's pool on their website. I bet they thought no one would ever notice.