My Account
If you want to find Gus Gager, the three best places to look are the Manly Sailing Club, Weiti Boating Club or out at sea. Gus has been Commodore of both clubs, and is Patron of Manly Sailing Club. His enjoyment of being out on the water dates from childhood holidays at his family’s bach in Manly and, now that he is semi-retired, he spends as much time as possible racing or restoring Zephyrs or aboard his launch Merita. He spoke to Terry Moore about his years “mucking about in boats”.
I have been involved with the Manly Sailing Club since it was based in a small room at the top of Jim Grayson’s beach house at 65 The Esplanade in Manly. I was about 10 at the time, in 1953, that the club was formed. I used to sail a P Class in the summer holidays – Manly was a big destination for sailing, and many families used to come just to spend the summer sailing, with races held every second day from Boxing Day until January 9. The New Year’s Day regatta always drew very large fleets – in January 1964 there were 165 yachts competing, which was a record. Getting to the family bach in Manly from home in Mt Albert was a long trip before the harbour bridge was built; I remember going through New Lynn, Henderson and Riverhead and the metal road on Whangaparaoa Peninsula was rough and windy.
After racing a P Class as a boy, I got into Zephyrs in the 1970s. They’re a pretty little (11 ft) boat, designed by Des Townson and I’ve had several over the years. I had three as a young man and lately I’ve been buying them and restoring them because they have become sought after again. One was so rotten that the guy who had it intended to get the mast and sails off it and burn the hull. I did it up and sold it and the new owner launched it at Manly recently and it was beautiful – like a piece of furniture; you’d be scared to take it racing for fear of damaging it. Another boat we restored was a clinker dinghy designed by Arch Logan in 1936 that had been stored in a bach for about 40 years. It came to us with big old car wheels with rope around them and that was the beach trailer. It came up really nice. I work on the boats in the garage at home – my wife has only recently been able to put her car in the garage for the first time, and that meant selling two boats to make room! I’m a builder by trade, and I’m lucky because my son, Kelcey, was a boat builder for several years and so we can work together on the boats. He had to leave boat building to become a builder because he was overcome by the Epoxy and other solvents used on the boats.
I did my building apprenticeship with Maddrens and Colin and Rex Maddren, the sons of my employers, now sail Zephyrs at Manly. I always wanted to be a builder, and over the years have done a lot of renovation work as well as building some nice houses including a fair few on the Coast. When I started we did 90 percent of our work on The Esplanade, between our place and the sailing club. There have been a lot of ups and downs in the industry over the years but I think now is the worst, with a lot more licensing and regulation faced by builders because of the leaky home drama.
Being on the water has always been special to me. I use a ride on mower with no mower attachment to take my boats to the water – in summer I go fishing between Manly and Tindalls a couple of times a week in a dinghy and I still race my Zephyr and go out on the launch. Last year I had both my hips done which slowed me down a bit, and at Christmas I went out in the Zephyr for the first time since the operation. It was hopeless – I couldn’t get from one side of the boat to the other and even fell out once; I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to keep doing it which was not a good feeling. But at Labour Weekend I went out and did three races, so it’s slowly coming right.
It was while I was getting my hips done that I got to know Harold Bennett, who was on the race management team for the America’s Cup. Harold lives in Dairy Flat and sails a Zephyr at Manly and he had his hips done at the same time as me; we also both had physio at Waiwera Pools. Harold had the job of telling people when the America’s Cup races were cancelled and he got quite a bit of flak for that. He’s good at giving bad news and pretty practiced at it after doing the job for years at various international regattas. He’s also been involved with Yachting NZ’s Youth Training scheme. Next Easter when Manly Sailing Club hosts the Opti Nationals, Harold will be in the clubhouse. There will be judges on the water, but Harold will have to deal with the “on land protests” that inevitably come from parents.
One of the reasons NZ has had so much yachting success internationally, in my view, is young sailors learning in the P Class – all the America’s Cup sailors went through P Class. Dean Baker and Ray Davies both sailed them as teenagers, at the same time as my son. Dean came to our place when he was about 16 to coach kids from Murray’s Bay and Manly in P Class. We held the weekend courses at home for a few years in the 1990s, with the boats on our front lawn and they all stayed the night in what is now my wife Lesley’s art studio. However, the popularity of the Optimist is killing the P Class; you might get 20 or 30 boats at a P Class nationals if you’re lucky, but around 300 are expected at the Opti Nationals in Manly next year. Optimists are popular mainly because kids who sail them can compete overseas and parents, as well as kids, like that – the first 20 kids in the Opti Nationals can compete in overseas regattas. The thing is that the P Class is less forgiving and it’s been said if you can sail a P Class, you can sail anything so it’s been a great training ground for Kiwi sailors. Another issue for sailing is that there are a lot more sports to choose from these days and kids don’t tend to stick with sailing unless they really love it. It’s not a cheap sport and it can be time consuming – Kelcey was a keen P Class and Starling sailor, and for us it meant spending every weekend all year going to races. We got to travel around the country though and met lots of people.
We’ve lived in Manly for 30 years, after building around the former family bach, and have seen a lot of changes as the area has grown. In the 1960s and 70s there were a lot more people at the beach in the holidays than there are now, because people would come and spend all their time at the beach whereas now that so many people live here they don’t go to the beach as much. However in the last year I’ve noticed the beach filling up a bit more with day trippers stopping here rather than heading further north.
In the early 1970s and early 80s as Whangaparaoa became less of a holiday destination and more residential, the Manly club’s sailing season changed from a holiday programme to a full sailing season, run by locals. By the early 1990s membership had dwindled and the club struggled to survive, but the Waterwise programme improved things when it was introduced in 1992 and increased the number of junior members in particular. In recent years the Bic class has been very successful, and fun, for the young ones. It’s good to see them out on the water.
