What we do...

You just can’t pick when the callout will come. Which is why we're ready to attend to the pager going off at any time.

in this case it's Thursday morning at 0846.

On the way to the boat, I called Ops to find out about the job, and it was a boat out at Great Barrier needing a tow to Sandspit. Obviously we're not going to be home for lunch so I stopped off at the local Z service station and picked up some sandwiches and Muffins for the crew.

We set to off Great Barrier Island by 0930, once we had provisioned and sorted ourselves out. Nothing was spoiling, the customer was safe. The day was calm and the sea flat with a slight swell, lovely day for a tow.

The customer’s boat was anchored off Nagle Bay.

The boat was a 35-foot bridge deck cruiser, 91 years old and Kauri planked ( see pictures). The keel pin had broken. The owner had already dived down to inspect the damage and had tied the rudder midships before we arrived. Some things you just can’t plan for and a broken Keel pin is probably one of them.

We quickly got him hooked up and towed out towards Sandspit where he had arranged to be hauled out on Friday to get it fixed. All was looking good.

Then as we came up to speed ( around 10 knots) it was obvious the rudder wasn’t amidships and the boat was veering well to Port. We found, when slowed to around 7-8 knots, the veering was manageable and on we went.

The owner later came back saying he thought he could adjust the rudder slightly so we stopped for him to play with his jury-rigged rope. Unfortunately, it didn’t work and instead now the rudder pushed him off to starboard and we were limited to around 7 knots, it was also jammed so no more adjustment.

Overall, the tow back took around 4-5 hours and by the time we had him on the working berth at Sandspit Marina it was 1730, 8 hours after we left. The good thing was we were able to do a fair bit of training and solved many of the world’s problems during the journey.

Many Thanks to Dave, Neale, and Luke, all of whom gave up their whole day for no reward and instead had to spend it with me …

Great job by all of them. Also to Ruth, Neale’s wife, who came down to take some photos and to Dave’s wife the only person to make sandwiches - apart from the Z.