A WEE DRAM OF SOMETHING DIFFERENT
BY BADEN PASCOE W
hitianga fisherman Warwick "Wok" Goodman now has his Cygnus 38 GRP purpose-built fishing
boat in home waters. She was unloaded off the boat carrier Egelantiersgracht on September 15 and will be in Whitianga undergoing a massive refit to transform her into a longliner. This was a "boys' own adventure" and a trip of a lifetime for Wok and his close friend Lyle Wood, another Whitianga fisherman. Wok had been searching various websites for something a little different from what was locally available.
He eventually found the Snowdrop, an 11.5m boat advertised in the Shetland Islands. After talking to her owner and asking a load of questions, the next stage was to go and have a good look. He told Lyle he was going to the Shetlands to look at this boat and in about five seconds flat Lyle had signed on as second mate if the purchase eventuated.
107(49) Certified
MEPC
Flexible configuration to fit in small space Completely Automatic Operation Continuous Perfomance reporting IMO MEPC 107(49) Approvals US Coast Guard Cer
rtifed
ABS Type Approval Simple Design Very low Maintenanc
Laminar flow ce
Self Priming Max coalescence Min power requireme
ents
OILY WATER SEPARATOR
The Shetlands has a special meaning
for Lyle, as his late mother Betty was born there and this was an opportunity to do some family research. As a memento of this visit, Lyle bought a 5.2m Shetland Maid canoe- stern, ship-lapped sailing skiff, which was promptly loaded onto the Snowdrop's deck. It will look a treat sailing on Mercury Bay.
The Snowdrop
Cygnus Boats, which specialises in a range of practical, good-looking GRP workboats up to about 13.5m, built the
Snowdrop in Cornwall in 1989. She was launched as the Renown and her first owners worked her as a scallop dredger out of Out Skerries, a smaller island to the west of the main Shetland Group. She was then sold to another fishing family in Whalsay, another island in the Shetlands, where she was converted into a trawler. Wok and Lyle sailed her from Whalsay to Lerwick and got to know some of her secrets. The main one was fuel contamination and this created a challenge during the entire voyage. Once they had made the 24-hour crossing to Peterhead they felt more comfortable and enjoyed the friendship offered to them by the local fishing communities all the way down the coast.
Initially they were going to ship her out of Grangemouth, but when they arrived there they learnt their shipping provider had changed plans. So they carried on down the eastern coast, making several stops, past Dover to Southampton, where she was loaded onto the Startinggrat for the voyage to Florida. Snowdrop was lifted on the hard for a few weeks and then loaded onto the Egelantiersgracht for the final leg to Auckland. Snow Drop certainly has great bones and it's not hard to see
why Wok purchased her. She has some very nice gear on her, including sonar, "but everything has been run down," says Lyle.
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70 Professional Skipper November/December 2011 VIP.S82
Her engine is a Gardner 6LXTC coupled to a Twin Disc transmission and she has a very large fish room for a boat of her size. In fact, when you're on deck you think you are on a 13m vessel. Snow Drop is not the only British fishing boat to be imported into New Zealand. Vessels like Green Pastures, Richard and John, Girl Isobel, Energy and Olympia come to mind. It's so nice to see these good-looking boats find homes in our local ports and I have no doubt she will be an asset to Whitianga's harbour scenery.
