East Sepik Province. At that time, it was still the East Sepik
District and there was no Papua New Guinea. In 1975, this new country
was formed out of the Australian Territory of Papua and the United
Nations Trust Territory of New Guinea.
I soon realised that in Wewak I would have plenty of spare time after
six minutes past four every week-day evening and the whole weekend
too, with very few ways of spending that time unless I developed a new
interest. I wanted to get out onto the Bismarck Sea, within 10 metres
of my doorstep, to fish, perhaps to dive and just for the fun and
relaxation of being on the water.
I decided to design and build a boat. On a piece of white cardboard
that had once stiffened a new boxed shirt, I made a scale drawing of a
v-bottomed hull planing hull, four-and-half metres long and nearly two
metres wide. The drawing was rather crude, but it showed a conic
projection of the bottom and the corresponding curvature of the frames
needed to ensure that plywood would wrap around the hull properly.
I started to order materials, tools and an engine. Plywood, monel
nails, brass screws, glue, paint and marine plywood were all available
at the local Burns Philp hardware store. I asked for quarter-inch
(6mm) plywood, but did not notice until construction was well under
way that the store delivered three-sixteenth-inch (4.5 mm) plywood;
more about this later.
There was a delay in getting timber to make the keel, frames, chines,
gunwales, beams, stem and seats. Eventually Harry Dzueric delivered
the timber -- beautiful lengths of dressed, seasoned rosewood. John
Niblet, a friend from Lae, perhaps 1000 miles around the coast, helped
me by purchasing and shipping to me a pair of oars with rowlocks and
a set of hand-tools. As I recall, there was a large steel L-square, a
steel tape-measure, a hammer, several clamps of different kinds, a
brace-and-bit, a plane, a surform file, two handsaws and a couple of
screwdrivers. Somewhere along the way I acquired an electric drill
with a sanding disc and a set of drill bits.
In due course the boat was finished and painted, but still there was
no motor. Eventually the local agent delivered the 25 h.p. pull-start
outboard that I had ordered many months before. Not having a trailer,
I decided to keep the boat moored in a shallow lagoon just near the house.
It was very convenient to wade out, hop into the boat, start the motor,
let go the mooring and be out into the open sea in almost no time at all.
The bottom of the boat was anti-fouled and it floated so high that the
motor would tilt up completely out of the water, safe from the risk of
corrosion.
I discovered the hard way that there was one problem with the mooring,
which was an old rusted engine block. One day, when there was almost
no current and a spring tide, the boat settled onto the mooring. The
rusted metal soon punched holes in the bottom so that the boat continued
to lie on the ground as the tide rose. Fortunately I noticed what had
happened well before high tide; I was able to beach the boat and,
eventually, repair the bottom. To prevent this happening again, I found
another heavy lump of scrap metal and from then on tied the boat fore
and aft between the two moorings.
I was very pleased with my design. To my eye its sweeping sheer and
elegantly crowned foredeck were set off nicely by its somewhat unusual
colour-scheme: white inside with a lilac topsides and foredeck. The
sheerline was accentuated by a rub-rail which was somewhere
between mauve and royal blue. The boat performed to my satisfaction.
At rest it was a stable fishing platform, because it was so beamy. It
threw very little spray and tracked well in a following sea. It was quite
bumpy heading into a chop, but this could be minimised by easing back
on the throttle and putting someone well forward to keep the nose down.
There was one fault: because the plywood was so thin, the bottom would
flop in and out in a most alarming fashion as the boat ran along. I should
have used two layers of quarter-inch plywood instead of one layer of
three-sixteenths. Fortunately, the boat kept on holding together.
