PERFECT MODEL

Boats can be beautiful objects – works of art in fact. And when they are scale models, hand-built for the joy of replicating a loved vessel, they are something exquisite indeed.

Aucklander Bruce Tantrum has created more than 200 scale-models of real-life vessels in his lifetime. He works from his garage below a block of apartments in Auckland’s Orakei. From the garage he has views of the Hauraki Gulf towards Rangitoto Island. And inside it, he brings scale-models of boats to life.

His apartment is full of replicas he has crafted. He knows the history and detail of each boat intimately – possibly because he has plenty of time to ponder it while he goes through the painstaking, months-long process of creating one.

Bruce was one of five brothers, born in Levin and raised in Lower Hutt. As a youngster he became fascinated by boats. His first boat was a 12’6” clinker dinghy purchased by his father, Jack, for fishing on Wellington Harbour. After retrofitting a centreboard case, rudder and centreboard, he was sailing.

On a family camping trip in the tropical north Bruce discovered Auckland for the first time and knew, with his love of yachting and aspirations to be a boatbuilder, it was where he would live. Unfortunately, timing worked against him.

Raised in the shadow of WWII, he visited the waterfront area that is now St Marys Bay in Westhaven in search of an apprenticeship but was told the boatbuilding industry couldn’t offer him the opportunities he needed. Instead, he became an apprentice housebuilder but kept his dream alive by building a keelboat: a 30-foot Van De Stadt design called Temptation. “A 30-footer before I turned thirty,” he quips.

After crewing in the 1972 race to Noumea, he was inspired to sell Temptation and build a vessel capable of offshore racing. Paramour was a 36’ John Lidgard-designed sloop. “I asked John for a boat I knew I could afford and had room for. She was big enough for my family,” says Bruce.

Even at that stage Bruce was playing with scale: “Before I started building I looked up the metric equivalent of 36 feet. It was just under 11m. So I built Paramour at 11m, which is exactly 36 foot and 2 inches.”

She was clearly a very successful boat for Bruce: he