Motoring on land and sea

By ROBIN BAILEY

Beachfront living at Milford on Auckland's North Shore. The sea only a few metres away, marvellous day, just right to go boating. But getting out on the water means hitching up the boat and heading for the nearest ramp if the tide is right. Then there's the hassle of queues to get in and out of the water.

There has to be another way, thought former computing industry whizz Maurice Bryham. After some lateral thinking and several hundreds of thousands of research and development dollars, he believes he has the answer.

He calls it Sealegs, an amphibious marine craft that eliminates many of the problems facing trailerboat owners. His outboard-powered rigid inflatable boat has motorised wheels on hydraulic legs. These retract when the craft is afloat and propel it over all sorts of vehicle-hostile seabed and beachfront surfaces on the type of fat wheels found on quad bikes and other all-terrain vehicles.

Bryham's Westhaven-based company, Sealegs International, has a 4.7m model in production and is ready to produce versions up to 8m.

Joining Maurice Bryham in the marine venture is David McKee Wright. The pair's business association goes back almost 10 years to PC Direct, the successful computer company Bryham formed with Sharon Hunter. When that company was sold, Bryham and McKee Wright moved into exo-net, a world-beating accounting software company they later sold to Australia's Solution 6.

Their next move was to become major shareholders in IT Capital, a company involved with a range of leading edge technology companies, which last year took a 70 per cent interest in Sealegs.

Bryham researched 100 years of amphibious craft and quickly ruled out the cars-that-can-go-to-sea formula that had attracted most interest in the past. He decided on a boat that could be driven to and from the sea and the project was born.

The first prototype was completed more than a year ago. What followed was a year of fine-tuning and re-development. Getting the project to production stage has cost more than $300,000, helped by a grant of $100,000 from Technology New Zealand.

"Our aim all along was to keep everything simple," Bryham says. "We knew the well-proved RIB technology was the right way to go, the boats are light but rugged and perform well. The big challenge was getting the legs right. There was lots of trial and error but after a year of testing we now have a high-performance boat that is truly amphibious."

Aircraft-type technology enables the legs to be retracted once the boat is in the water. A 13hp Honda four-stroke motor under the centre console provides the power to drive the rear wheels. Hydraulic steering automatically engages to operate the craft on land and a tiny computer controls the retractable gear at the touch of a button.

With a 60hp outboard, the boat has a maximum speed of 60km/h and a top land speed of 10km/h. The craft has been land-tested on a range of rocky surfaces, soft mud and soft sand and can handle territory that the developer says would be impossible for a four-wheel drive towing a trailer.

Beachfront residents who want to cut the tractor-trailer option out of the boating equation are expected to be the first Sealegs customers.

Other uses the company's market research has identified include superyacht tenders, island resort recreational craft, search and rescue, yacht club patrol boats, aquaculture and coastal surveying.

Bryham and his team believe Sealegs has tremendous export potential. "There's nothing like it anywhere in the world," he says. "All the necessary patent protections are in place, so what we have to do now is get into the international marketplace."

The 4.7m Sealegs Explorer costs $75,000.