140 Boating New Zealand
From the outside, the rusty corrugated iron shed gives little clue as to its contents, but the
frozen-hinged door creaks open to reveal an Aladdin’s cave of boatbuilding treasures.W
e’re at the yard of Harold Saunders,
who’s spent nigh on 50 years building
all manner of boats from this shed –
trawlers, launches and clinker dinghies.
And the spritely 81-year-old is still hard at
it, building yet another clinker dinghy.
The Saunders boatyard is located on 400ha of scrubby
bush in the Marlborough Sounds. There, Saunders and his
wife Janice have raised four children, farmed, built countless
boats, numerous sheds and a six-bedroom house; their energy
and drive is unbelievable.
The roots of the Saunders operation belong on the other
side of Cook Strait, where in the late 1920s his father Alfred
Saunders founded a boatbuilding yard in Paremata, just out
of Wellington.The Harold Saunders story
with JOHN MACFARLANEREFLECTIONS