Vintageview
John Stubbs
In his retirement, John has developed his passion for model boats, a passion that grew from a lifetime of modest yachting and from the first model launch he built in 1958 as a young married man.
John has just recently moved into a retirement village at Whangaparaoa where one bedroom is full of delectable model yachts which include most of the radio-controlled yachts he has built over the last 12 years. He has great pleasure in sailing these yachts on the pond at Onepoto Domain, Northcote.
Hundreds of enthusiasts sail all kinds of craft there. The Onepoto Yacht Club sails Des Townson-designed Electrons, the NZ Radio Yacht Squadron sails Kyosho Seawinds, while radiocontrolled freelance yachts of all descriptions, old time pond yachts and model speedboats fit in around the schedules of these clubs. Prolific constructors like Derek Nicholson of Kumeu and John Stubbs turn up on Thursdays with a wide variety of superb models.
John became involved in yachting from an early age. His father Wilfred Stubbs built him an Idle Along in 1947 when he was 15. Wilfred was an engine driver for NZ Railways, often on the Main Trunk Line. When overnighting at Taumarunui became tiresome Wilfred went into administration, eventually retiring as Stationmaster at Penrose.
The Stubbs family lived at 21 Kowhatu Road, One Tree Hill, those days a long bicycle ride to the sea. Father and son sailed with M. J. Whitten in his Idle Along at Kohimarama and both got the yachting bug, despite one capsize which had John floundering about under the mainsail and his father bellowing at him to get out.
Wilfred, who had no previous woodworking experience, decided to build an Idle Along for John who remembers his father, in exasperation, saying, “If this plank doesn’t fit, I think we’ll set fire to it!” But it got finished and named Maggie, after the Maggie of the Australian wartime radio show “Fred and Maggie Everybody”, popular on station 1ZB.
John and his dad made no attempt to register and race Maggie as they knew she would never measure. Instead they kept her at Okahu Bay and sailed her about just for fun, cycling down from One Tree Hill with her sails, as one did in those times.
John left Auckland Grammar School and joined Milne & Choyce as a salesman, a vocation he thoroughly enjoyed all his working life. After he married Jean in the mid-fifties, boating went on the back burner until they had a house and started a family. While living at Titirangi in 1958, John built a model power boat with a diesel engine. He ran it off Mairangi Bay beach, no radio control, just the rudder set to keep her circling, thoroughly scaring the bathers.
Next John built a 12-foot, hard-chine dinghy which they took on holidays at the Jack & Jill Motor Camp in the Bay of Islands. Encouraged by the success of the dinghy, John undertook the construction of a Hartley 16 trailer-sailer, a class which was booming as a result of sponsorship by Richmond Yacht Club and their full racing programme at Westhaven.
Again, he had worries about measurement, but the measurers passed John’s Jaunty in spite of an extra half inch of beam. The Stubbs family raced her with success at Richmond, the Freshwater Champs at Rotorua, Taupo and as far as Wellington, winning a lot of silverware.
As the family grew up, the Hartley became rather cramped for cruising so John bought Naiad, a 1901 Seabird design by Charles Mower and Thomas Fleming Day, the editor of the highly influential yachting magazine Rudder.
The Seabird was a 25ft 9ins hard-chine yawl intended to be an easily-constructed cruiser for the eastern seaboard of the United States, but soon proved to be ideal for very spartan offshore work. The magazine had published working drawings which were a model for step-by-step amateur construction of this strong, seaworthy and well-proven type.
Hundreds were built all over the world in the first decades of the 20th century and they gave great service. The Tercel brothers of Ponsonby built Naiad for themselves in August 1914. She went through many hands over the years (see Vintage Perspectives September 2017) and had grown an ugly doghouse when the Stubbs family bought her in 1967.
After selling Naiad in the early 1970s, John built another Hartley 16, Jaunty Bird, which again he raced with Richmond. Jaunty Bird was followed by another Seabird, this one in very sound, original configuration.
She was named Seabird, one of Naiad’s contemporaries but built in Roseneath, Wellington by William Waddilove and his future brother-in-law, the famous Harry Highet of the Tauranga 7-footer (in Auckland the P Class) and many other outstanding centre-boarders.
When she was completed in late 1913 or early 1914, the two young men skidded Seabird from the Roseneath ridge down the steep zigzag path in the gully and launched her at Balaena Bay. During the 1914 and 1915 seasons they raced her with success with the short-lived Te Ruru Sailing Club in harbour and longdistance races. Later notable Wellington owners included the Kirkcaldie family of Kirkcaldie and Stains, and Harry Higham who later started Sea Spray magazine in 1946.
Seabird gave way to the bigger Classique, a very fine H28 in which the family did extensive cruising for several years. The concept of the H28 was similar to that of the Seabird. Both were Yankee designs for the same purpose, wholesome safe cruisers, easy to build, not fast but weatherly and sound for family cruising.
L. Francis Herreshoff designed the H28 in 1943 and cautioned against ANY changes to his model in wood. Several were built in
Auckland as hire boats but then Compass Yachts reworked the design, raised the sheer, increased the rig and built hundreds out of fibreglass! They have proved to be enormously successful in this country. The Stubbs were very happy with Classique, but John itched to build himself another yacht.
The next yacht was a Jim Young 29 he called Mohawk. John bought the yacht as an unfinished hull and completed her at his Forrest Hill home. The family had her for several seasons before they felt it was time for a launch that John and Jean could run by themselves.
True to John’s desire for good looks they bought the very pretty sedan 30-footer Cleone. She was the first boat that Jim