The other Auckland steel yacht,
ANOTHER AUCKLAND IRONWORKER was Tom Bach who decided to join the Seagars and the Masefields and build his own steel yacht. Oliver Waymouth drew him the plans for a 2½ rater in the winter of 1895 but construction didn’t start until 1896. She was launched as Isafrael on 27 February 1897, black-hulled and similar to Huia, not surprisingly. She did a little racing on a long handicap with the short-lived Ponsonby Sailing Club in 1898 and 1899, but Bach sold a half-share in 1901 to Sam Levy, the rear commodore of the newly-formed Ponsonby Cruising Club.
Levy sold his share to Fred Carter who raced Isafrael with Victoria Cruising Club in 1904. Carter and Tom Bach partially replated her and altered her significantly in 1906, changing her name to Autere. Later owners renamed her Rambler, but her popular name was Tintanic and she was getting pretty shaky.
In 1915 her owners Slattery, Adamson, Boyd and Brooking of Northcote enlisted. They sold Isafrael/autere/rambler/ Tintanic for scrap; her lead was in demand for ammunition manufacture. This was the fate of many New Zealand yachts in wartime.
a layer of wood each side of the keel to make it a minimum width.
Huia’s racing history was solid with several wins with the AYC – later the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron – and the various regattas, but she was never really competitive against the Bailey and Logan crack 2½ raters. Huia and Thetis often cruised and fished together; the two sets of brothers – the Seagars with Huia and the Masefields with Thetis – got on well, if tending to wildness on occasion. However Huia soon started on the same electrolytic, self-destruction process as Thetis.
The Seagars sold her to Ernie ‘Pirate’ Payne of Thames in April 1902 and he sold her by auction in Auckland in October 1903 to Wilson of Ponsonby who sold her to P R Mcgill a year later. Huia came ashore at Devonport in 1907. Mcgill apparently decided that she was unrepairable and broke her up.
In November 1903, the Seagars replaced Huia with the early 5-rater, 33-footer Toroa, designed by John Waymouth Sr and probably his son Oliver Waymouth. Toroa was built by his other son John Waymouth Jr for a syndicate of Clarke, Tripp, Goodare and others and launched in November 1891. The Waymouths were the team that produced the strange 2½ rater Yum Yum a year later and who had a big hand in Thetis. Toroa had a good racing record but was outclassed in terms of speed and raceworthiness by the more recent raters. They sold her to F Kunst of Ponsonby less than a year later. She was a victim of the February 1917 cyclone which smashed her up in St Mary’s Bay. Of the four Seagar brothers who ran their engineering business at the foot of Hobson Street, William and Henry died in 1907, leaving Charles and George in charge.
After Toroa, the Seagars decided to go in for power boats. In a later article we’ll see how the Bailey brothers produced the hulls and the Seagars produced the boilers and engines for several high quality steam launches, including two called Rehutai. B