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TOP A newly-built 13.7m fishing launch leaving the shed.
BELOW The main boatbuilding shed measures 27m x 12m....there was never
any question over his
choice of a career:
it was always going to
be boatbuilding.Alfred had originally served his apprenticeship
with Wellington boatbuilder Joe Jukes, followed by
time with Percy Vos in Auckland. After a stint in the
Pacific Islands, he moved back to Wellington and
began building round-bilged, double-ended fishing
trawlers and clinker dinghies.
Born in 1936, eldest son Harold Saunders grew
up working in his father’s shed and there was never
any question over his choice of a career: it was always
going to be boatbuilding.
In those days, most self-respecting boatbuilders
also designed boats and, more often than not, from
models. From an early age Harold Saunders would
craft model boats, which his father would critique and
often make him redo. Hard lessons at the time, they
taught Saunders the importance of fair lines, water
flows and hull resistance.
With an increasing availability of more powerful
marine engines in the early 1960s, the Saunders
boatyard began designing and building hard-chine
boats. The inspiration for the shift to hard chines
came from design books detailing the research and
experience gained during WWII with high-speed
motor launches. But by then Alfred Saunders had
virtually given up boatbuilding.
“He preferred fishing with my two brothers Alf
and Reg in a 55-foot launch he’d built himself,”
Saunders recalls.
Saunders had taken over his father’s yard but by
the early 1960s it became a victim of progress when
the railway line was moved to between the shed and
the sea, making boat-launchings virtually impossible.
By this time Saunders had amassed a little capital,
building and then leasing out a 15.2m fishing boat. In
1966, newly-married to Janice and with two young
children, Saunders bought a 400ha run-down farm in
Tory Channel. He moved his family into a ramshackle
cottage on the farm and converted the woolshed into
a boatbuilding shed.