Whakatahuri in outer Pelorus Sound was once home to a family boatbuilding business and the most remote boat-wrecking yard in New Zealand, which employed dozens of people at its height.
They should make a movie about this place. The Smash Palace of boats. In a north-facing bay in the outer Pelorus Sound at the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, Whakatahuri sits near Allen Strait, between the Mainland Te ParuParu/Forsyth Island. It’s the unexpected site of two businesses that dealt with the opposite ends of a boat’s lifecycle: the Wells family’s boatbuilding business and the Sounds Wrecking Company, now long gone. Once upon a time, Whakatahuri was the most remote boatbuilding and boat-wrecking yard in New Zealand.
Whakatahuri is found within the almost bewildering maze of the Marlborough Sounds and is a place of simultaneous delight and destruction. The nearest towns are Havelock and Picton, equidistant as the seagull flies, about 20 nautical miles – though much further via the water, which is the only sensible way to try to get here. Best accessed, in fact, on a cruising catamaran. As we did.
The restricted site on a narrow neck of land is also a photographer’s dream. Shipwrecks abound, towed here during a time when Sounds Wrecking was the only shipbreakers’ yard in the country. The company took on some really big ships in its time, reducing them to marketable timber, second-hand fittings, and non-ferrous metals. On-selling bed linen, crockery, cutlery, porcelain wash basins – even light bulbs. Whatever could command a price and bring home some cash. It was a boating business with little sentiment and a lot of noise.
At their height, Wells and Jones employed dozens of people, who dismantled all kinds of boats, from big to small, including ships like the Kaitoa and Waitangi, which had been in charge of the Lyttelton to Wellington run back in the day. Whakatahuri was a cacophonous site back then, of crashing and bashing and breaking up. By today’s standards it would have been a health and safety nightmare. The most visible wrecks still there are those of the Tiroa, built by Lane & Brown in 1916 (her hulk now provides a breakwater for the Whakatahuri boatshed); and Valmari, a 145-foot, three-masted schooner, built in Hobart in 1917.
Old anchors are everywhere (they’re units that resist breaking into smaller parts). A unique historical boat is among the wrecks – it’s being restored slowly. Very slowly.
Here is also a place to yarn about good boats: old and new, big and small, as long as they’re wooden. David Harrison Jones will want to talk about them. Davey Jones is well into his 70s now and has his share of yarns, including how he once had to sail a thoroughly-trashed-by-the-French Greenpeace protest yacht back from Mururoa Atoll to Tahiti. “The boat was buggered. Everything was wrong with it.”
‘Connoisseur of Classic Wood Boats and Ancient Lister Engines’ it says on his business card. He is the surviving owner of the former Sounds Wrecking Company, his former business partner Francis Wells having moved off this mortal coil some time ago.
Davey Jones is living out his days in unhurried bliss, tinkering aboard his boat the Kelvin at Whakatahuri alongside Francis’ son, Gavin Wells, who tends to take charge of emergency grocery runs in the Echo, a modified fishing boat. Assorted volunteers (minimum stay seven days) help with the household chores, cutting firewood, and restoring historic buildings – the old schoolhouse is currently being converted into a tiny museum. Family come at holiday time and stay as long as they like. But mostly it’s just Davey, Gavin, his partner Natalie Everett, their dog Polly, and a few goats. Bellbirds provide a constant, other-worldly soundtrack.
It’s a remote place. It takes Davey seven hours to get to Nelson to visit his ‘lady friend’. They keep a car at Elaine Bay, a two-hour trip away by sea. The mail run boat from Havelock (the ‘Mussel Capital’ of the world) comes once a week on Fridays with fresh supplies – and, sometimes, those keen young volunteers too.
Builders & wreckers
The Wells family began building boats 150 years ago on this site, and Gavin is the last of the family to carry on the tradition – though he’s now mainly involved with boat restoration rather than construction.
The biggest boat built by the Wells family was the 45-foot launch Noelene, built by William Wells in 1937. The family specialised in slim, easily-driven launches unique to the Marlborough Sounds. Right now, in the boatshed, there’s a leisurely restoration going on of Tanekaha, nicknamed ‘the Splinter.’ Boating buffs will be intrigued by its extreme narrowness and distinctive torpedo stern. The boat really looks like one hull of a modern cruising catamaran.
When we visited, while on a circumnavigation of Te Ika a Maui (via the Marlborough Sounds) aboard our 40-foot sailing catamaran, Davey insisted we tie up at his mooring in the bay and talk boats with him for hours. Fine by me. Using the mooring is a seamanlike option, for with anchoring you run the risk of fouling the wrecked shipping detritus that litters the bottom of the bay.
Both the boat-building and wrecking businesses became uneconomic in such a remote location. Now Davey, Gavin and Natalie subsist mainly on the modest income from the small mussel farm out in the bay, but the mussels grow slower here than in the inner Sounds. Natalie reckons the future is in a seaweed-harvesting industry. She has an “amazing pesto recipe” for seaweed she likes to make. Previously a computer technician, she otherwise busies herself with fine sewing projects and restoring the old buildings on the site. “Down here you make do with what you’ve got.” Looking around at the remains of so many boats around her and the bright blue bay beyond, she considers that statement. “But we’ve got a lot.”
