WANDERER

Some times classic wooden boat owners get a little precious with their boats i.e. no fishing (too messy & smelly) but the photos above of the the launch Wanderer clearly show that to the original owners they were just a means to the real challenge – catching big game fish.
We have seen lots of photos of 40’+ launches hauling in large catches but Wanderer II would have to take the prize for small boat, biggest fish 😉

I understand that Wanderer these days resides on A Pier at Milford Marina, needing some TLC but still a float. Any of the woodys able to enlighten us on her life post the above photos from the Auckland Museum’s Tudor Collins collection?

These days I would be happy to catch what they have hanging off the stern as berley 🙂

Photos below of Wanderer 2015 at Milford Marina ex Ken Ricketts

Input from Russell Ward

How lovely to see her as she was originally. Yep. A real honey. The modern alterations are a bit of a miss-match of angles but have been like that a long time.  Capt John Watson owned her when my old man had Ngakiwa early -mid ’60s and we cruised together in the gulf. Had the cabin sides that she presently has. She had a petrol engine that was unreliable and I remember Len Heard (Kenya) lent John a headsail in case the engine really died. He put a Perkins in about the same time my father had Tracey Nelson put one in Ngakiwa. John sold her and bought Nohomoana (38′ Sam Ford) to keep up with the Wards when they got Naiad.
I met up with Wanderer at Lake Rotoiti a year or two back -she was a bit scruffy and heard that she came back up here.
Hope she gets that TLC s

22–05-2021 Input from Rick Rowarth – My grandfather, an Auckland surgeon Mr Frank Macky owned Wanderer for a number of years I think from the early 50’s to early 60’s and my introduction to the Hauraki Gulf was on the wanderer. What a wonderful introduction I got in my formative years. Frank just got too old to go off boating around the early to mid 60’s, and sadly had to sell her. He loved nothing more than to go down the harbour, often on his own and would usually end up at Woody Gully on Rakino or Days Bay at the bottom end of Waiheke where he had a smokehouse at his sisters house. He never came home empty handed, and back then if he caught a gurnard he would take it home for the cat. Back then Wanderer was powered by a 4 cylinder Universal petrol engine that was far from reliable, and the petrol tanks were filled by taking off the fuel tank caps “in the forward cabin”, and filling them up. How we never blew up I will never know, but we survived. The story about the missing porthole was down to a collision with (I think) a ferry, and the repairs were done I think by Percy Voss at Westhaven.