1st Motor Boat on Lake Wanaka 

In the days before the guys at Boat Haulage were around, it was a real mission to launch the woodys, & some were more challenging. In the above photo we see the first motor launch for Lake Wanaka being transported there by horse & wagon team.

Photo ex University of Otago / Hocken collection via Lew Redwood’s FB page.

Its a long shot but any able to ID the launch?

Another of Lew’s photos, below, is dated 22 December 1956 (just 6 days b4 I was born) – any clues on the location?

Harold Kidd Input – The launch is TILIKUM, formerly on Lake Wakatipu. She was taken across from Frankton to Pembroke in September 1904 on a timber wagon driven by J Brensell. Her owner was Capt McDougall. TILIKUM was probably a rename after Capt Vos’s canoe TILIKUM which had just visited New Zealand and created a great deal of interest, so her provenance is obscure. Certainly she’s a typical early 20th Century canoe-sterned oil launch in the Logan Bros style.

There’s a suggestion that TILIKUM started life as a torpedo boat based in Dunedin. Haven’t had a chance to check that out but it seems plausible.

Update 27-06 The “torpedo boat” origin is rubbish. The Dunedin-based Thornycroft spar torpedo boat TAIAROA wa a hugely different animal which was decommissioned about the time TILIKUM appeared, but that’s the only common context except the “torpedo stern” and that it seems TILIKUM first owner, J.C. McBride of Queenstown, bought her in Dunedin. I reckon she was probably built by one of the top Dunedin/Port Chalmers constructors like Jas McPherson or Jas McLellan.