FERRO FOR LIFE
Chas Strange recalls a lifetime spent building boats for cruising Kiwis.
Whatever happened to ferro-cement yachts? A few decades ago backyards all over New Zealand housed boatbuilding projects. People toiled on their dream designs – hulls by Hartley, Samson and Donovan – the structures laboriously shaped with steel bar and wire mesh.
It was a progression from Johnny Wray and his yacht Ngataki
– anybody with the determination, energy, good health and commonsense could build their own boat quickly and relatively cheaply, put it in the water and sail the world.
One man, with more than an ample amount of those qualities, even built nine boats in his spare time. Now aged 94 and living aboard his launch Twilight in Whangaroa, Chas Strange shakes his head ruefully. “Looking back,” he says, “I wonder how I found the time. You have to forfeit all normal holidays and weekends – and focus on finishing the job at hand.
“There were some early disasters with ferro boats – people built them too light or with really rough plastering jobs. Some 36 ferro yachts were under construction in the Waikato area when I was elected commodore of the Waikato Ferro Yacht Club in 1971.
“But for hulls longer than 33 feet (10.1m) timber construction is heavier than an equivalent ferro cement boat – and ferro is strong.” The hull on one of Strange’s first ferro boats, Manuhiri, was ¾” (19mm) thick and, tested by the DSIR, withstood 8,346 psi (586.8 kg/cm) pressure.
“I’m a ferro fanatic,” he says. “It’s long-lasting too – there are ferro hulls up to 100 years old and still in operation. It’s cheap and easy to repair. Great stuff.”
But one of the biggest problems with building a boat, he recalls, is sightseers. “People think nothing of wandering onto your property to ask questions and rubberneck. We had 82 sightseers on the weekend prior to launching Stranger, a 41-foot Alan Orams Raiatea design. “One guy had a look and said: “Do you think it will float? I used language I hadn’t used since the Navy.”
The young Strange followed the route taken by so many boatingmad young Kiwis – building boats out of cashiered corrugated roofing iron and, in one case, a hapless farmer’s stock of strainer posts. But the seeds were sown for a lifelong love of boating during a voyage on the steamer SS Ruawai from Helensville to Ruawai in the Kaipara Harbour – visiting relatives with his mother.
Later he enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Navy and was trained as a signaller, mostly serving in mine sweepers around the Hauraki Gulf. He also served a five-year apprenticeship as a cabinet maker/machinist – skills that stood him in good stead when his boatbuilding compulsion took hold later in life.
With his wife Yvonne he established a joinery business in Cambridge and built his first cruising yacht, Grestan, a John Spencer 30-foot glass-over-plywood Sabre design. After several seasons cruising in the Bay of Plenty and two sons to accommodate, the couple opted for a larger boat and built
Stranger.
“But we cut it a bit fine on the way to launch her in Auckland,” he recalls. “We went down Broadway in Newmarket before the police closed it for Christmas – and when we got the boat down to the wharves she’d become festooned with all the Christmas banners that had been strung across the road.”
While in Cambridge, he continued building ferro boats and completed two 45ft vessels, built to a Richard Hartley Tahitian design. Honest, big-volume cruising ketches.
For 30 years he sang as tenor in the Cambridge Quartet, a Waikato foursome which won the group section of the Mobil Song Quest and performed with Dames Kiri Te Kanawa and Malvina Major on radio and with live performances.
Several offshore sailing trips added to his hard-earned stock of seamanship skills, learned from decades of wending his way up and down the north-east New Zealand coastline in a variety of vessels. He was also an NZYF Cat One inspector, ferro boat surveyor and valuer.
At that time ferro cement boats were commonplace. In 1973
Helsal, an Australian ferro cement yacht designed by Bob Miller and dubbed the “floating footpath” took line honours in the Sydney Hobart race. Later in her career, the ferro flier was sold to a charter operation in the Philippines, wrecked on a reef and is currently used as a liveaboard in Manila Harbour.
Legendary plasterer and ferro cement yacht designer and builder, Everard (Ev) Sayers was producing boats from a yard in Whangarei and travelling around the country with a gang of plasterers to finish off other hulls.
The 1974 singlehanded trans-tasman yacht race fleet included Annette Wild, the world’s first woman to complete a singlehanded ocean yacht race in her self-built 33ft ferro cement yacht Valya. Englishman Roger Taylor was in the same race with Roc, a 19ft ferro boat he’d built in a barn near Cambridge. The 1982 singlehanded race was won by Jon Sayer (Ev’s son) in Floating Footpath with a time of 11d 10m 41s to cross the Tasman.
Eventually the Strange family moved aboard full time and lived at Herald Island in the muddy upper reaches of the Waitemata Harbour where Chas built a 34ft Ganley called Old Timer in steel. This was followed by a 46ft yacht, Sally Forth, to his own design as was another, Stranger 11, (35ft) in ferro-cement.
“I suppose building boats had become a compulsion,” he says. “My statement that I was building my last boat became a family joke. I was strongly supported and assisted physically by a good, understanding, hardworking wife, who – fortunately for me – preferred boatbuilding to housework. My fingers would be pink and bleeding from hours of twisting wire ties.”
He and Yvonne had fallen in love with Whangaroa – the “jewel of the north” as he calls it – and based themselves in the wonderfully sheltered and scenic haven. True to form he built more boats: a 33ft trawler yacht hull in Kaeo and a 35ft trawler in Totara North, both in ferro to his own designs.
Yvonne was taken by a sudden heart attack in 1996. For most of 30 years, says Strange, he has always lived on anchor, self-sustaining and independent. “Life is every minute of the day. How well did you manage your life and time?” he asks.
“I’d rather be sailing, recalling happy days in Whangaroa Harbour with sun, sea, fish and scallops, glorious safe cruising havens and sailing companions. I decided years ago that frustrating days in endless traffic queues, inhaling lead fumes while dutifully associating with plastic people wasn’t for me.”
Late in life the pen became Strange’s tool of choice and his autobiography – A Strange Liveaboard – was printed in 2015 by Weaving the Strands publishers. It documents a time when New Zealanders who wanted a boat just built one. His lyrical poetry extolling the attractions of Whangaroa is regularly published in the local newsletter.
Home these days is a Ganley-designed 36ft steel trawler powered by a Ruston Hornsby diesel, a big old British lump of cast steel that develops about 60hp. “That’s Clydesdale horsepower – not show ponies,” he hastens to point out. Running at about 900rpm, it gives a cruising speed of 6 -7 knots.
“I’m happy with that – life is about the voyage – not how long it takes to get there. I’m in no rush.”