RETRO BOATS
Reflections: The Ken Sharp Story | Crossword Sailor-scribe: Frank Wightman | Restoration: Robertson 11.8m Vintage view: John Stubbs and his boats Boat brief: Trillian Trust Classic Yacht Regatta
Ken Sharp, or Sharpie as he’s generally known, has been operating the Floating Dock in Westhaven Marina for 40 years and over that time has built up a passionate client base.
Sharpie’s been around boats all his life and it all began with his father Allen, who owned a little cruising keeler, and his mother Tess, who was a very good rower. In the early 1950s Sharpie raced Zeddies and Idle Alongs at the Hobsonville Yacht Club.
Sharpie’s always earned his own money; as a teenager he ran two paper runs – the Herald in the morning and Auckland Star at night – while working weekends and holidays with Northshore Concrete Products making concrete blocks.
By age 16 he’d saved up enough to buy the International 14, Neptune, which he raced with two others. The International 14 is a two-person boat, but as Sharpie and his crew were so light it wasn’t a major disadvantage.
Around 1968 he got into mullet boats and bought N12 Wairere, one of the 20’ N Class. After five years of racing her with the Ponsonby Cruising Club, he bought the Collings & Bell-designed L Class Mullet Tamariki, which had won the 1968 Lipton Cup with Sharpie crewing.
He skippered Tamariki for three seasons before selling her and opting to crew for Don and Jim Lidgard in their Mullet boats. The Lidgards won the Lipton Cup twice with Sharpie crewing.
Then for his big OE, he accepted a crew position on the 11m keeler Witchcraft, a lightish USA One-ton yacht returning home. While the voyage began promisingly, it began unravelling when they were hit by the tail end of hurricane south of Rarotonga.
Witchcraft’s skipper tried towing a car tyre but the rope chafed through, so he deployed the anchor off the stern. This didn’t provide enough drag and Witchcraft took off down the face of a wave, slammed into the trough and pitch-poled. Along with the rest of the crew, Sharpie was downstairs at the time.
“There was a crash, it went all dark and suddenly there was heaps of water inside,” he recalls.
No one was hurt, but Witchcraft suffered damage to her windows, stanchions, handrails and lost the dinghy. After the hurricane abated, Witchcraft limped into Rarotonga, where they spent six weeks repairing the damage.
Sharpie stayed with Witchcraft until she reached Hawaii, where he joined another yacht heading for Vancouver. It was there that he saw a rudimentary floating dock, which sat on four fixed poles, with the platform raised and lowered with an electric worm drive on each pole.
At the time he thought, “That’s a smart idea,” and stored it away for future use. After three months in Vancouver crewing on race yachts, he moved to Long Beach, California, where he worked as a race crew.
He’d been away two years when he came back to New Zealand and took a spar-making job with Fosters, then owned by John Street. “John was a helluva good boss, he let me build a new mast there after hours.”
The alloy mast Sharpie built was for a little plywood keeler he’d bought, a double-ended 8.5m Daydream class, designed by Australian sailor Peter Fletcher. Sharpie left Fosters to set up a mast-making division for Stewart Scott’s Marine Metal Fabrications, which he ran for several years.
After selling his keeler to his father, Sharpie commissioned Dave Jackson to build an Alan Wright Marauder 8.4m. As was common then, Sharpie and his friend Ken Moir finished off the Marauder’s bare hull and decks and launched what became
Kasmic – she became a very successful racer.
FLOATING DOCK
Meantime, and unbeknown to Sharpie, engineer Don Thom had designed and built what became known as the Floating Dock. To finance it, Thom and his three partners had obtained a Development Finance Company (DFC) loan of $250,000, a significant sum in those days. One could buy a pretty nice house for $90,000. The loan was to be paid off by a royalty for each boat cleaned.
But when Thom launched the Floating Dock (around 1977) it wasn’t an instant success.
Boaties, then, were more frugal and usually did their own bottom maintenance. If they needed an interim clean between haul-outs, they’d use the tidal grids, a series of vertical poles situated in the sheltered sou-east corner of Westhaven. That this took eight to ten hours wasn’t considered important.
It would take many years for Westhaven boaties to accept the advantages the Floating Dock offered. Thom and his partners didn’t have the patience and decided to sell. Sharpie saw the potential and bought the Floating Dock by selling Kasmic and taking over the DFC loan.
The purchase price included a covered 24m barge, which had spent its early years as a shingle barge on the Waikato River. Sharpie sublet the barge to the late Bruce Elliott, who owned Mast & Spar Services. The Floating Dock and its barge were located on poles just off Westhaven’s eastern seawall and were accessed by dinghy.
By the mid 1980s the Floating Dock was becoming
established and Sharpie was making inroads into the DFC loan.
Unquestionably his gregarious, easy-going nature, along with his professional competence won him many customers. There were other reasons for Floating Dock’s success: with the freeing of import controls and a booming sharemarket, boaties were happier paying others to do their maintenance. Additionally, serious yacht racers quickly learned a regular water blast translated into positions on the track.
The Floating Dock settled into a nice little earner. But life has a habit of dealing up unpleasant surprises and over the years Sharpie’s been dealt three. The first occurred around 2009, when he suffered a series of strokes and was forced to cut back on work. While he’s since recovered, for a time he was facing a forced, early retirement.
Indirectly, his health issue helped create the second situation. While at home recovering, his then employee decided to help himself to the till. A trusting soul, Sharpie didn’t have the most robust financial systems, a situation the employee took full advantage of. It took several years before the ongoing theft was discovered.
The third card was the most unpleasant. In 2010 Westhaven Marina’s owners, Ports of Auckland (POA), decided they required Westhaven’s eastern sea wall for superyacht moorings.
At that time, Sharpie and Elliott were on an informal quarterly lease arrangement, which had worked well for over 20 years. Initially, POA took a hard stance, both businesses would have to vacate the seawall and where they went wasn’t Poa’s problem. Things looked grim.
Fortunately, Sharpie and Elliott had many Westhaven friends including then Westhaven Marina manager Russell Matheson and then chair of the Westhaven Marina Users’ Association, Trevor Dunn. Both went into bat for Sharpie and Elliott. Additionally, hundreds of Westhaven boaties, aghast at the potential loss of their maintenance services, signed a petition.
“Without that support I think we would have been gone. It was absolutely marvellous the way they all supported me,” says Sharpie.
Facing a backlash, POA became more reasonable and after countless meetings it was agreed Sharpie could relocate to the end of X Pier. But POA set tough health, safety and environmental requirements, which Sharpie had to meet and fund, to the tune of $150,000.
Sadly, despite being a well-established concern, Mast & Spar Services didn’t survive. Elliott died unexpectedly in 2010 during this process and his son Brett was forced to wind up the business.
Early in 2011 the Floating Dock was towed to its new location, where apart from a minor shift around the corner of X Pier, it’s been ever since. With hindsight, the move’s been successful. The Floating Dock now has several new features; a toilet, a well-equipped workshop and smoko room, while its compressor and water blaster are now driven by 240-volts rather than a noisy diesel.
Last year Sharpie decided he needed to spend more time boating. He put the Floating Dock on the market and marine engineer Clinton Shuker bought it. While Sharpie will still be seen at the Floating Dock to ease the transition for Shuker, he’s far more likely to be seen at the helm of his other baby, the Mk I Corsair Amethyst.
On behalf of all Westhaven boaties, Boating New Zealand wishes Sharpie a long and enjoyable boating retirement. After 40 years cleaning bottoms he’s certainly earned it. BNZ