What Am I Doing Here?

Here's an unusual thing-a boat builder in a place that doesn't have water, not even a little stream unless it's raining hard enough to drip from the roof. You'd think he'd be up the proverbial creek without the usual paddle but,

actually, Craig Partridge is smarter than that and there's method in his perceived madness at building boats in the rural heartland of industrial Waipapa.

 

"A mate and I bought two blocks of land together and he saw an opening for a transporting business and built this really cool truck which is designed to go down a ramp because there aren't many travel lift facilities in Northland."

 

The ramp he's talking about is Waipapa Landing, across the highway and downabit, so with boat moving facilities right next door -and not being right next to the sea-fades practically into insignificance. Well, almost.

 

"I got an order fora60' sailing catamaran, 35' wide, so that's when we moved to Waipapa and built the shed and that's why the doors are so wide. Waipapa Landing was just wide enough so we were able to stick the cat down there. It's okay for multi-hulls but not race yachts or big keelers and anything deeper than an eight-foot draught has to go to Opua."

 

Kerikeri's loss is Opua's gain. It would help to have haul-out facilities a bit closer to home and to capture business from Auckland even if one could get resource consent which under the current zeitgeist is more likely to stymie business development than promote it. Still, even this hasn't unduly affected Craig's boat building operation. He has export orders on his books and is in the throes of tendering for more.

 

"We sent a15metre power cat to Australia last year and the year before we sent an 11 metre power cat to Noumea and we're dealing with another couple of customers there at the moment, it's a good market for us. We're dealing with Australia and looking at a cool race boat for Wellington."

 

Craig Patridge's father wasamerchant sea captain who built boats in the backyard and raced and that's where the bug came from. He's been in the boat building business all his adult life with the last 20 years in Kerikeri, creating employment, earning export dollars, paying tax. Even if the current economic climate is what he calls 'a bit sad' he's still doing things entirely without government incentive or assistance, or what MP Mike Sabin would refer to as 'enablers', and it's not as if the Far North doesn't have the specialised talent needed to fulfil orders.

 

"I could go out and in two weeks have ten good people working here. There's no shortage of skill. Some very clever people have come here for the lifestyle."

 

Given the rhetoric at the recent economic summits neither is there shortage of talk about giving Northland businessesahelping hand. At the moment Craig Patridge Yachts employs eight people all up and says 16 or so would be a 'nice number' plus contractors. That would probably allow him more opportunity to continue a very successful competitive career on a variety of boats. His last big event was the Auckland to Noumea race in June.

 

"We were sailing into the wind, 55 knots of air and six-metre breaking swells. Two boats were seriously broken and three others had to pull out. It wasabit shit!"

 

He owns a 45-footer with some friends, a machine, a beast, very hard he says, in which they contested the round North Island two handed event. He's done a lot of multi-hull racing including the Coastal Classic on Split Enz, which held the record of7hours 20 minutes for a dozen years before being broken recently.

 

He'll do it again in October and in January 2013 contests the Bay Regatta in a 25' Rob Shaw sport boat with four crew. He reckons he's just about young enough to still handle it by stacking 'loads' of Voltaren on board. And of

course it's multi-hull racing in the next America's Cup compared to which he thinks the old single-hull America's Cup boats are 'really boring'.

 

"Just wait till they wipe themselves out at 45 knots!" he says with a big grin of expectation on his face.

 

In the meantime there's a business to run. He wants to build high-tech composite or wooden boats, to create a market niche, and to continue exporting from the wilds of Waipapa. There are many who'd call that hard work and exciting at the same time., too.