It wasn’t long before the boat-conscious people of Whangaparapara, on Aotea Great Barrier Island, started speculating about the exotic newcomer settled amongst their moorings.
The boat’s sweeping sheerline, shapely stern and varnished ketch rig were more classic American features than anything and the guesswork centred on John G. Alden or Herreshoff, or other American designers.
But the new boat in the bay, Destiny, was built to lines that her owners – Rick and Chrissie Haslet – had dreamed about for decades before beginning construction.
“Aesthetically she’s my design,” Rick explained. “She’s loosely based on an Alden Malabar – but a ketch, not a schooner. Her stern comes from a Starling Burgess design, Nina (a 26m schooner that disappeared in the Tasman sea in June, 2013).”
“My first boat was a 6.7m Alberg Sea Sprite which I bought as a bare hull when I was 22 years old,“ said Rick. “I was constantly redesigning it to make it better.”
He sailed her to Florida and lived aboard for two years. The next boat was a Herreshoff 28, a ketch he sailed from 1978 to 1990. “The whole time I was sailing that boat I was designing Destiny.”
The young sailor grew up in Wayne, New Jersey and spent his high school holidays in the Caribbean at St. Croix working for Dick Newick, the famous multihull designer. He lived on a 9m native sloop, crewed on a 12m catamaran, and went to Martha’s Vineyard to help Newick build trimarans such as Moxie, which won the OSTAR race across the Atlantic in 1980.
He later delivered Rogue Wave, a famous Newick trimaran, to Dubai and cruised the Strait of Hormuz.
“I graduated college with a degree in psychology,” he said, “and did volunteer work in psychiatric hospitals for a while and taught at a school for the mentally impaired – hard, hard work.
“I knew what I wanted: proper bulwarks and wide side decks.” A local wooden boat guru, Nat Benjamin, drew the underwater lines – “he gave me a table of offsets up to deck level,” Haslet recalls. Destiny ended up being 12.8m LOA with a 3.6m beam and 1.83m draught.
Benjamin Reeves, brother of Superman film actor Christopher, let him use his property at West Tisbury on the understanding that Haslet would build a shed which Reeves would keep at the end of the project.
“I built an insulated 6m x 9m shed with a 6m x 7.6m greenhouse adjacent, but the boat was built by eye – and there was nowhere I could step back and get a good look at her! Winters there are brutal, so I’d often go to the Caribbean then and boat build in summer.”
Planking began using 30mm western red cedar, edge-glued and fastened with bronze nails every 200mm. “I did it like that so I could do it all with small tools. There’s 660 litres of WEST System epoxy in her,” he said. “She hasn’t got any frames – just bulkheads and the interior furniture which is totally glued – no mechanical fastenings.”
Maple and cherry panelling, lavishly varnished, line the warm and homely interior. Cabin sides are single pieces of silver Bali–Surinam teak. “I wanted the interior to be as light as possible,” he said.
Six layers of bidirectional glass fibre cloth were applied to the hull, inside and out – “I got to the stage where, working by myself, I could lay four planks a day.”
The stern is cut from Okeume plywood, the stem from 32 layers of 6mm fir and the planking continues beyond the first 16 layers so no end grain is left exposed.
The tenure agreement at the Reeve’s property ran out while Destiny was still a-building, so Halsted moved the boat to the Martha’s Vineyard Shipyard where he worked as quality control manager.
“The locals scoffed at me…saying I was way overbuilding her,” he said, “but Noel Barrott the New Zealand wooden boatbuilder and celebrated high latitude sailor, came to have a look at her. He had a good look over what I’d done and said, ‘Nope, you’ve got it right.’ So I knew I was on the right track.”
Meanwhile, 15,000 kilometres or so away, another kind of destiny was taking shape for the hard working boatbuilder.
Chrissie Allan had graduated BSc from Massey University and had an inkling to see the world. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she said, “so long as it was outdoors.”
She worked as a rousie for a shearing gang in Taihape and at Craigieburn Station and caught the skiing bug working at Porter Heights. Next there was a stint working on prawn trawlers in northern Australia.
“I dreamed about being in the outback so took a bus to Catherine and spent a season as camp cook on Wavebrook Station. It was great – I cooked for 15 guys out of a hole in the ground!” The nearest shop was about 1000km away. During the wet season she explored South East Asia and returned for another stint in the outback.
“Then I flew to Tahiti…and on to Los Angeles, heading for Colorado to do some skiing. During the summer she drove across the USA, returned to Colorado in the winter and then went to see a friend at Martha’s Vineyard.
“I walked off the ferry and was immediately offered a job at an upmarket French restaurant.” She soon progressed from waitress to head waitress to manager and then set up in business as an interior designer and upholsterer.
That work included covering boat squabs which is how she came across Rick, toiling on Destiny.
“I’d been boatbuilding for five years – I told her it would take me five more years,” he laughed. “It took me 15.”
Meanwhile, Chrissie had started sailing and liked it.
The 5000kg of lead ballast that the boat needed looked like becoming an expensive headache but a storm swept through Martha’s Vineyard and wrecked a few boats in the harbour. “We chain-sawed their keels off, scrounged around the tyre stores for old tyre weights, and got the lead from the walls of an old x-ray building that was being demolished.”
Two other boatbuilding projects were underway on the island, so they all chipped in and built a bonfire to melt the lead and cast their keels. “It was wild,” Haslet said. “Chrissie got her eyebrows burned off and somebody called the fire department which turned up to put it out!”
With the keel cast, a WW2-vintage threading machine was located and refurbished to make the 11 x 25mm keel bolts that hold the ballast on. Haslet also made patterns for all the deck fittings and had them cast in bronze by a foundry on the mainland.
Hollow fir masts were glued up and stuffed with aluminium foil to give a better ‘paint’ on ship radar screens. “We’ve spoken to passing ships and they’ve said we stick out like….well, you know what.”
Finally, after 20 years a-building, the gleaming ketch was ready for launching and hauled from the shed at Martha’s Vineyard Shipyard where Rick had worked as quality controller. “We expected about 150 people to turn up – but in the event well over 300 came.” Friends shouted 60 bottles of champagne and other friends helped Chrissie’s father, Les Allan, to fly from New Zealand for the occasion.
“We were walking down the street a day or so before – and there he was,” Chrissie recalled. “We both burst into tears.”
Like many expat Kiwis, the couple had made regular trips back to New Zealand to catch up with family and friends.
“We visited Great Barrier Island and just thought ‘Wow! – we’ll live here one day.”
That day has come. Destiny and two shipping containers were packed with tools and other worldly possessions for shipment to the island, 52nm NE of Auckland. The Stars and Stripes on Destiny’s flagstaff have been swapped for the New Zealand ensign and work is well underway on their new house.
“We’re going to grow old here – so we’ll need a workshop each,” Chrissie said. Meanwhile Destiny hangs off a mooring in the bay – just to keep the locals guessing. BNZ
Ketch Destiny Specifications
loa 12.2m (42’ 0”)
beam 3.6m (12’0”)
draft 1.86m (6’ 0”)
displacement 12.727kg
fuel 300 litres
freshwater 720 litres
engine 75hp Yanmar
