PALOMA
The above photo of the launch Paloma comes to us via Lew Redwoods’s fb. The corresponding story supporting the old press clipping from the March 26, 1929 edition of the New Zealand Herald newspaper, states that Paloma was owned by a Mr W. Sinclair and was destroyed by fire, followed by an explosion, during the previous weekend. The incident occurred off Kauri Point and the cause was unknown.
Do we know the name of the designer / builder and year launched ? 

Harold Kidd Input – Built by Colin Wild to a design by W.H. Hand in August 1926. Power by a 4cyl Daimler truck engine. Lots of torque but low revs!

WW SITE USAGE

If any of the readers are wondering why we post stories like the above, I’ll explain – when I started the waitematawoodys site its primary purpose was a channel to chat to like minded true-blue wooden boat admirers, on a regular basis about wooden boating stuff. But over time as the site became more popular, the daily visitation numbers and the focus of the visits / readership changed. Now on an average day, 62% of people are reading the story of the day and 38% are using the search box (or google) to find / research intel on a particular vessel or designer or a combination eg Colin Wild launches from the 1930’s, some obviously do both – we like that 🙂 .

So woodys, stories like today’s are all about building the back library up, and then at some stage in the future, someone will search using maybe W. Sinclair’s name and up will pop Paloma and if we are lucky that person might be related to Sinclair and have some old photos, and those photos might prompt someone else to comment – its called user-generated content (UGC) and it really turbo’s the google search ratings.
And a funny – ex UK cartoonist Mike Mockford