FELISA

photo & details ex Harold Kidd ex John Blundell

Stan Blundell, of Fisher and Blundell, got his cousin Gerry Lane to design a 32’ x 9’6” motor-sailer for him in 1949. Gerry was then a school teacher but had served his time with Bailey & Lowe who had no job available for him when he came out of his apprenticeship at the beginning of the Depression. He never lost his skills and his love of boat building, however. Harold has heard a claim that the boat was designed by Garth Lane of the Lane Motor Boat Co, but says that’s incorrect.
Stan had her built by Phil Barton in St. Mary’s Bay. She was fitted with a 4 cylinder Ford diesel and, although lightly rigged, the Blundells used her sails to good effect in making passage and could get 8-10 knots under sail alone on a broad reach. Her coamings were teak and kept varnished. Stan named her Felisa as it is the Spanish equivalent of Phyllis, Stan’s wife’s name. Phyllis spent much of her early childhood in Guatemala and grew up bilingual.
The Blundells lived at Lynch Street in Point Chevalier. Felisa was moored off the property and took the mud at low tide.
Stan sold Felisa to Tairua, his son John thinks, around 1959, and she was later stationed at the Barrier. Harold had a report of her in 2000, owned by Callahan.
In one of the photos, she is on the mud off Lynch Street near a 20ft open cockpit hard chine launch designed by Ron Oliver, a design which won a Sea Spray competition. Several were built. The structure in the background is the old quarry on Meola Reef.
John Blundell would very much like to have Felisa’s recent history filled in.

Where is she now?

Update 27/01/2015 – CYA member Mark McLaughlin snapped the photos below of Felisa on her Tamaki Estuary mooring. The motor-sailer rig has been chopped ‘a little’.