Kate sails again
After seven years of painstaking labour, the 1898 cutter Kate is back sailing on the Hauraki Gulf.
They were the builders’ utes and courier vans of the Hauraki Gulf. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, sailing cutters delivered anything they could to communities scattered around the shores of the Gulf, and on the islands within it. And returned with mail and farm products.
In those days, the water was the road to these communities, and quicker and more reliable than transport across the land. The hard-working cutters soon found themselves out-paced by pocket steamers – and these took over regular routes carrying passengers or time-sensitive cargo, like milk. But for more than 50 years, the cutters were everyman’s transport option.
And then, like much related to the age of sail, they faded away. Into memories, museums, paintings and romantic books. The advent of diesel engines was their death knell. Still, some adapted to the changes.
The oldest two sailing cutters in New Zealand – Rewa and Kate – today find themselves in very different circumstances. Built in 1886 in Kirita Bay, just south of Te Kouma on the Coromandel, Rewa is now an exhibit at Auckland’s Maritime Museum. There used to be a ‘notional’ jetty leading to her, where visitors could step aboard, but no longer.
Kate was built in 1898 at Kaipara and, by contrast, is out on the water again, brought back to sailing trim after a seven-year restoration project orchestrated by boatbuilder and designer Bernard Rhodes on Waiheke Island. And the results are pleasing – for an old dame Kate is surprisingly nimble and manoeuvrable.
For a lifetime, it seems, she had been beached among the houseboats at Waiheke’s Okahuiti Inlet, in Pūtiki