My Account
Born at Whangateau in 1929, Bryan Walden, has had a lifetime love of the sea and ocean racing, in particular. He still holds the course record in the Auckland-Latoka Race and was at the helm of Falcon, when it became the first concrete boat to race offshore – a feat still recognised on the Honours Board, at the Akarana Yacht Club. Until recently, Bryan was living permanently aboard The Black Pearl, a 70ft square rigged yacht, often seen moored off Scotts Landing. Since coming ashore he’s decided his new challenge is to reduce his golf handicap. Jannette Thompson caught up with him at his home in Kaipara Flats …
It was around 1964 when I realised that what I really wanted to do was ocean racing. I guess growing up at Whangateau, and being around boats all my life, had sown the seeds for bit of adventure. I’d bought Rev Jasper Calder’s house, on the Tamaki River, and developed the Eastern Marina which included slipways, ship’s chandlery and a charter boat business. In three years I went from being a sole operator with equity in half a launch to owning 10 launches and employing 17 staff. It was a great advantage to have my own facilities. But my goal was still to find time for ocean sailing. My first race was the Onerahi Yacht Club’s Whangarei to Noumea event. I sailed the Marangi and came 7th in a field of 38. There’d be no way you’d be allowed to race a boat like her now – she had no self-draining cockpit which meant if she went over you were sunk. We decided we needed a better boat and that lead to a whole new era in my life. Together with Morely Sutherland, one of the pioneers of ferro cement boats in NZ, we built the Falcon, a 56ft ketch, which I raced for the first time in the Auckland to Suva race.
Altogether, we built 40 to 50 concrete boats at Greenhithe. Our contemporaries were Lyall Hewitt and John Maurice who founded Compass Yachts, which started in an old hay barn in McLeod Rd, Henderson. I asked John Lidgard to look at modifying the rig, layout and tines of the H28 for production in fibreglass, and the result was the Compass H28. We built a wooden hull, which was used as a male plug for the first hull mould, and then a wooden deck and cabin. The first glass hull and deck was moulded and partially finished in time for the 1972 boat show and we got 25 orders in two days. In the first year we had 180 orders. Just prior to this, Broadlands had purchased Half Moon Bay Marina and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse so I was also working for them, handling all the merchandising. Part of my contract included two months off a year to cruise the Pacific!
Since retiring from racing, I’ve done charters in the South Pacific, circumnavigated the South Island and skippered the boat that escorted the Maori canoe to Rarotonga for the South Pacific Festival. When I was 72 I couldn’t find the boat I wanted, so we bought the place on Woodcocks Road because it had a shed big enough to build a boat in. I wanted to make the best boat possible and something that I could handle on my own. The result was The Black Pearl – nothing to do with that ridiculous movie that came out a few years ago either – 70ft, square-rigged with a Gardner diesel engine. She’s got about 2500 sq ft of sail area and weighs 35 tonnes. She’s really strong with a steel framework, sitting under a fibreglass resin. The name comes from an encounter with a pearl trader in Fiji who sold me one black pearl. I had planned to have the pearl mounted, but it was stolen.
My maternal grandfather Charles Gravatt worked in the shipbuilding trade, as a spar maker for Davey Darroch at Whangateau. We’re told he had a tremendously accurate eye and could split a coin, held between his feet, with a broadaxe. His mother was Mary Ann Dyer, from Pakiri, who was also a renowned axewoman, gaining some notoriety for being able to split 3000 kauri roof shingles in a day. Charles played cricket and while at a match in Auckland, caught the eye of a society lady Edith Harding, who lived in Epsom. She came from a very musical family and her brother was a senior tenor at Covent Garden in London. We can only imagine what a shock it must have been when she married Charles and found herself living at Leigh. Their daughter Muriel was my mother.
Dad grew up on land known as the gum flats, on the right as you approach the Omaha Causeway. By all accounts the family was dirt poor. He was about 14 when he started working with the Dalmatians digging for gum, but was soon trading the gum in Auckland and returning with provisions for the diggers. He prospered at this and ended up with a little store at Pt Wells, which he then transferred to the wharf at Big Omaha. There were no telephones, of course, so Dad would saddle up the old horse and do a circuit through Pakiri and Leigh, stopping at all the farms to take their grocery orders. Then, when the boat arrived, he’d use a two-horse dray to make the deliveries. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but he must have been pretty fit. I can remember seeing him wondering off into the bush to a house with a 200lb sack of maize over one shoulder and an armful of groceries.
The boat from Auckland would pull in to Big Omaha once a week and it was always a big day. Along with passengers and freight, it would bring in fuel supplies and Dad had the Dodge Agency, which eventually went to Tom O’Rourke in Warkworth. The boat had to be unloaded and re-loaded within a few hours to catch the tide. I was always trying to stow away and there’d be a big kafuffle as the tide started to run out and no-one could find me. One day Jean Dunning and Eva Schollum, who worked in the shop, must have decided that they’d had enough. They tied me by the foot and hung me upside down over the water. I made so much noise they knew exactly where I was.
The depression put a lot of strain on the business and in the end, Dad sold out to Ike Railey and moved to Matakana where he ran a garage. Arch Wilmot and Ray Harper worked there. It was on the river bank, near where the new toilets have been built. The garage burned down in 1935, so the business rebuilt across the road. Dad used timber from the old Puhoi convent, which he bought for £90, to build the garage, a showroom, our house behind the garage and another house at Pt Wells. I trained with Ford Motor Company starting off at Seddon Tech, followed by two years in Wellington learning how to build a motor car, covering every aspect of the motor vehicle industry trade. I’ve been blessed with a good memory for figures – I still don’t have to write down phone numbers – and at one stage, I knew the serial number of every spare part of a Ford motor car by heart.
