Ladies of the Lake
A fleet of 130 clinkers, steam launches, sailing dinghies and mid-19th century speedboats glided, roared and gurgled on Lake Rotoiti at last month’s Antique & Classic Boat Show. The 3000-strong crowd adored them.
Scores of aged vessels gathered at the 20th edition of Lake Rotoiti’s Antique & Classic Boat Show.
The hammered-silver Jens Hansen Cup for Best Boat Overall graced the foredeck of the 20ft 10in Aurora, an amateur-restored, 1935 open clinker boat. Behind the hard work was owner and restorer David Gollop.
David had a career in flight operations at Air New Zealand in Nelson but his hobby – he calls it therapy – was restoring old boats. His earlier projects included restoring a Stewart 34 and building a 30ft Pelin Patrol but he always wanted to do a big, open wooden boat.
“When I found her she was in a sorry state in an old shed in Hope but I didn’t even have to get out of the car,” he says. “There was no question I had to have it.”
That was February 2011 in rural Nelson. She was upsidedown on an unsprung trailer. David trucked her home to Redwood Valley and put her on a trolley he’d made in his shed.
There was no rudder or engine. Many of the planks were split; half the keel was missing. David built a new keel in laminated macrocarpa, replaced most of the copper fastenings and rebuilt the transom.
After three years, fitting boat work in between other commitments, David had sanded and painted the outer hull to perfection but when he turned her over, the inside was still a mess. It was like starting all over again.
He scraped away years of old primer and top coats, shaped the floor frames, fitted a new bronze shaft log and engine mounts. Recycled kauri came from ceiling beams from Matamata and floor joists from a house demolition in Tauranga. “The floor joists had nail holes. I didn’t try to hide that because they were part of the character of age,” says David. “I didn’t go overboard trying to make it look antique.”
He removed the decking back to the frames and replaced it with three layers of laminated, 4mm plywood as the base with 6mm kauri strips, steamed where necessary, glued on top. To design the rudder, he researched 1930s boating pictures. “I built it and cut it down at least twice until I thought it looked right.”
As originally built in 1935 at Port Nelson, Aurora was a lighter to tender explosives from the magazine on the Boulder Bank for reconstruction work on Rocks Road. She had no engine, possibly because stacking explosives either side of a