Roof liss the amphibious van
After watching TV’s Top Gear presenters drive a van across the English Channel, Dan Melling and Adam Turnbull decided they could have a crack at the Cook Strait. It was 2009 and the Kiwi friends were 23-year-old aeronautic machinists-intraining stationed in Blenheim with time to float ‘‘dumb ideas’’.
‘‘We sat down over a few beers one night and chatted about how we would go about it, what the logistics would be,’’ said Turnbull. ‘‘We bought this old van; we just sort of accidentally started it and then carried on from there.’’
They found the 1990 4WD Toyota Tarago van in Kaiteriteri for $500. It met their requirements for a floating vehicle – a low weight four-wheel drive – but the van didn’t even make it back to Blenheim.
‘‘We tried to drive it home. We got halfway and it was burning so much oil we ended up having to tow it from Nelson,’’ Turnbull said.
Their real success with the van was making the inside, rather than the outside, watertight. They sealed the ‘‘inner skin’’ of the doors and floor, then ‘‘went to town’’ filling it with expanding foam and polystyrene.
‘‘And it worked quite well, it was real stable,’’ Melling said. ‘‘We got a whole bunch of people in there and tried tipping it over in the river . . . you could hang a whole bunch of guys off one side.’’
Named ‘‘Roofliss’’ after the roof was cut off, the van never got a warrant of fitness and was ‘‘real slow’’. Even so, the boys took it on a few ‘‘pub crawl excursions’’ around town.
‘‘It was so fun to cruise around in . . . everybody comes up and checks it out and has a laugh,’’ Melling said.
The decision to cross the Strait was made the day beforehand. Finishing Roofliss in winter, both men had moved but were in Marlborough for a weekend filming with Campbell Live.
Realising the conditions were perfect, they spontaneously set off at 6am on a September Sunday in 2009. Jimma Dillon, from Seddon, was in the support boat.
‘‘It probably doesn’t get much better than the day we had,’’ Turnbull said.
The ‘‘pretty pain-free’’ voyage took nearly 10 hours, cruising out of Waikawa at 6am and docking at Mana at around 4pm.
Turnbull said they had been oblivious to the attention their excursion would get. ‘‘We thought it might get a 20-second snippet on the TV at the end of the news but it caught people’s attention. It was quite cool really.’’
More than a decade after completing the voyage that made headlines, Roofliss has had a few different homes. Initially taken up to Auckland by Melling, she was bought by Marlborough’s Mark Stevenson First National Real Estate for $9100 in a Trade Me auction. After a few years in Picton’s Edwin Fox Museum, Roofliss went back on the market in August 2015.
Turnbull’s mum, Averill Grant, stepped up, buying the vehicle for a token $1 and saving her from the scrapheap. The vehicle remains under a tarp at Grant’s property in Golden Bay, a legacy of Kiwi ingenuity and whacky youthful ideas.
I guess I had an attachment to it and the boys had done quite a great thing at a youngish age,’’ Grant said.
While Grant admits it’s the ‘‘ideal vehicle’’ for her beach-access only location, Roofliss doesn’t get too much action these days. ‘‘She’s starting to rust a wee bit but not too bad considering she’s been across that much saltwater.’’
Turnbull takes a peek from time to time when visiting his own mum. ‘‘I don’t know if it’ll ever go in the sea again. It’s certainly something I look back fondly on and it’d be cool to do something different again.’’