Respected boat builder retiring
Watching boats coming off the production line knowing he helped to build them makes Russell Hughes extremely proud.
Hughes has been a fitter and turner at Gough Bros Ltd in Invercargill for 57 years.
It’s been his only full-time job since leaving school but as 2018 comes to an end, so does his time at the boat building and general engineering company.
The 74 year old will retire on Friday.
Not once has he thought about leaving to work elsewhere.
‘‘I’ve never been unhappy here . . . it’s a privilege to be here,’’ Hughes said.
‘‘They are good guys to work with.’’
Hughes thought he had helped to build and maintain more than 200 boats, including large fishing boats and even Stewart Island ferries.
‘‘It’s very satisfying seeing them go on a trailer, taken to Bluff and into the water [for the first time].’’
Hughes has built boats for three generations in some families.
Occasionally, he gets a call at night or in the early hours of the morning from fishermen at sea needing advice on a mechanical problem.
Hughes has travelled around the country and to the Chatham Islands to do maintenance and install equipment on boats. Some boat owners have flown him to West Australia to inspect boats they were looking at buying.
‘‘You build up a rapport with people,’’ Hughes said.
‘‘When they ask you look at boats overseas, it shows they respect your knowledge . . . I guess.’’
Doing maintenance work on the Earnslaw steamship in Queenstown for 20 years also holds good memories for Hughes. When large cargo ships stayed in Bluff for long periods in the 1970s-80s, Gough Bros staff, including Hughes, would do maintenance work on them.
‘‘There’s not so many of them now [staying long periods]. Most are in and out.’’
Hughes and his colleagues have installed engines in concrete boats and put in generators and water tanks in boats to store live crayfish.
‘‘In the last two years we’ve installed air conditioning in the crew’s accommodation [of boats] area.
‘‘We’ve built a lot of crayfishing boats.’’
It usually took 12 to 14 months to build a large boat from scratch, Hughes said.
Wooden boats were common when he started his apprenticeship at Gough Bros in 1961. Later that decade, steel boats were getting built before a change to aluminium in the late 1990s.
Gough Bros were sometimes asked to extend boats from the back end.
Hughes used to do survey work for Maritime New Zealand in his spare time or during holidays.
The work involved inspecting boats for seaworthiness and to ensure health and safety requirements were met.
He has also done boat valuations for owners and insurance companies.
‘‘It’s very satisfying seeing them go on a trailer, taken to Bluff and into the water [for the first time].’’ Russell Hughes