Tony Watkins: Messing about with dreams

The first boat for many New Zealanders was one they built themselves. With a zero budget, it was probably rather modest. Perhaps a sheet of corrugated iron bent in half with the ends folded over.

Almost certainly it sank, but as you walked home through the mud and the mangroves, with a little experience gained, there was time to dream of better things.

Not everyone persisted, but some of those who did continued until their ambitions were no longer modest.

Sandy and Joan Mills wanted to sail the canals of France. They designed and built a a retractable-keel boat suitable for the canals, but to get there meant first sailing around the world.

The boat they built in their backyard in their spare time was to take them to a mooring in Paris in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and they were to sail back through the Pacific to complete a circumnavigation of the globe.

While they were on their four-year journey my humble owner-built yacht provided an excellent roost for terns and cormorants.

She looked something of a wreck with a solid layer of guano when I put her on the hard at our yacht club for a clean.

It was all rather embarrassing as she was surrounded by polished fibreglass hulls brought out to race before being carefully stored away from the sun.

A little boy wandered by to muse about the grubby stranger. "Gee, mister," he said, "have you sailed around the world?"

In my dreams I had.

The Commodore of the Royal Akarana Yacht Club understands all this. He wants Okahu Bay to be a community facility, one where oldtimers spend months working on their boats.

One reason it takes time is because they always stop to talk to the youngsters who want to know how to build their first boat, or what it is like to sail around the world. The hard is a mixture of boats, cars, paint tins and coffee mugs. A place where people still smile and everyone loves a yarn.

In another culture and another time this would have been the piazza, the heart of the city. Now our city has become an unfriendly place and so the heart has moved out to Okahu Bay.

The urban designers and city bureaucrats understand none of this. Their cities of polished granite and pretentious cosmetic architecture are built to be displayed in world-class magazines where you will look in vain for any sign of real people, or life.

Westhaven is for the millionaires who expect their sailing skippers to have their boats polished and the refrigerator stocked ready to entertain visitors.

Okahu Bay is for the old salts who build and repair their own boats.

Westhaven is for those who have it all but do not sleep well at night. Okahu Bay is for those who have no money, cannot quite work out how to get started, but do know how to dream.

But diversity, like sustainability, does not make economic sense and Auckland City Council has decided it is more efficient to put the managers who run a tight ship at Westhaven in control of Okahu Bay as well.

The fences are going up and the rules are coming in. Soon you will pay for parking and all the messy boats and messy people will be gone.

The laughter will die. The stories will be forgotten. The next generation of children will have nowhere to go for ideas about how to build a boat for themselves.

It will have cost Auckland's ratepayers $38 million to destroy another wonderful asset.

Kiwis have never assumed it was impossible to build yourself a house or to sail around the world. We have done it for generations. If Okahu Bay dies, we will forget who we are.

Great cities nurture those who dream of what might be. Great cities treasure those places where people learn about life and how to do things for themselves.

* Tony Watkins was co-author of the Waitemata Harbour Maritime Plan.