Wai Lani

All I can tell you is she is currently listed on trademe & if you believe trademe she is a 30′ 1922 Lane. As type this I can hear HDK saying “aren’t they all” 🙂

Can anyone confirm & or supply more details?

Harold Kidd Update

Aren’t they all?

But, seriously, WAI LANI was built for James Thomas Dart Lloyd, a Herne Bay builder and architect in 1916. The newspapers were fairly quiet on trivia like launches being built in 1916 (and it was possibly considered vaguely unpatriotic anyway). He kept her for an enormous period, finally selling her in the early 1960s. He died in 1965. 

I can find no certain reference to her builder (without a time machine). However a subsequent owner told me she was built by Dick Lang in St Mary’s Bay which figures because Lloyd lived in Ring Terrace only metres from Lang’s shed. However, she did have a Scripps 2 cylinder engine, for which Lanes were the agents, until 1930, when it was replaced with a 25hp Canadian-built St. Lawrence which engines were briefly popular at the time because of the lower duty attracted by “Empire Preference” tariffs, just as most of our Ford V8s were built in Toronto. So maybe she was Lanes. Lanes/Laing/Lang often get mixed up in these mythological whakapapa for launches.

There are some 1930s race entries in the name of Sam Leyland, the timber mogul. It’s clear that Leyland and Lloyd were buddies and neighbours and that Leyland must have been between launches (he changed them like the wind, often renaming them, bless his cotton socks)

So I can’t convincingly shoot down the “Lanes” but I can shoot down the “1922”.

17-04-2016  photos ex Fraser Chapman via Ken R