photographer PEN TAYLER
The Kerrawyn motors out from the jetty at Cygnet until it reaches more open waters, where the crew hoist the sails. In typically unpredictable Tasmanian spring weather, owner Anastasia Konstantinidis has chosen a perfect day. The sun is shining (there’s even some warmth in it), a stiff breeze fills the sails and the blue sky has some beautiful, light cloud formations. We are headed for Point Beaupré where we’ll drop anchor in the late afternoon and enjoy some Tasmanian gourmet food and Port Cygnet gin.
Before we left Cygnet, Konstantinidis went aloft to check the rigging, looking as though she has spent much of her life doing just that. It turns out she has, having worked on tall ships, with much taller masts, since she was 15. After an initial 10-day trip on the Leeuwin, she worked on a Japanese tall ship as it sailed around the world, and on the Endeavour and the Enterprize amongst many others.
David Golding, a shipwright, is at the helm of the boat he and Anastasia have been restoring for the past seven years. The pair met many years ago in Melbourne on a 100-year-old racing boat that Golding was restoring. Konstantinidis began working with him while she was waiting to start work on the Enterprize. By 1997, David and Anastasia had a child, Lewis, and had started a company restoring wooden boats and yachts, but there was always a long-term plan to buy one.
Golding says, “What really made me think about buying one was when I was given a book, Craft and Craftsmen of Australian Fishing 1870-1970, by Garry Kerr, about 25 years ago.” The book fired his imagination. “I’d flick through it and look at the different shapes and different boats ... dreaming of owning one of them, doing a restoration.”
Of course, being old and wooden, many of them were no longer in existence. “We would find one we really liked the look of [in the book] and then find out it didn’t exist anymore. So many went to Papua New Guinea during the war and were wrecked, or if it still existed, we’d find someone had already bought it.”
The wooden hull of Kerrawyn was built in 1948/1949 in Cygnet. It was then towed to Dunalley to have the deck put on and a fit out for the Young family. They owned and crayfished her for more than 30 years, before they sold her to Tony Purdon, of Strahan, in the early 1980s. The Purdon family used her mostly for shark fishing.
Meanwhile, in the early 2000s, David Golding and Anastasia Konstantinidis moved to Tasmania. During this time their relationship changed but they remained close friends. Once in Tasmania, David began looking for an old Wilson brothers’ boat. In 2006 he rang the owners about Kerrawyn, even going to Strahan to look at it. “I said to him, ‘is it for sale?’ and he jokingly said, ‘Boats are always for sale,’ but essentially he didn’t really want to sell it.”
Then one morning in 2014, Konstantinidis started receiving texts on her phone. “Everyone was texting me: my mother, my friends.” Kerrawyn was for sale on Gum Tree; the Purdon family had made the difficult decision to sell her. Konstantinidis rang Peter Purdon, Tony Purdon’s son, to register their interest. “I said to him, ‘The most important thing is to find the right person to look after it. You don’t want someone who’s going to buy the boat, chop the masts off, make a bit of a wheelhouse ... and of course then take it out of Tassie’.”
“Both families have had the boat in their lives for 30 years and the children have grown up with it, and the grandchildren. It’s not just the owners and the owners’ kids but their partners, deck hands etc. Such an enormous family, the boat has. It is a big part of their lives and quite an emotional thing. He had a couple of other offers but eventually he said he’d love us to have the boat.”
Konstantinidis handed over a pile of money to David and went off to sea for 100 days. It was a dream job for her, taking in South Georgia and Antarctica on the tall ship Europa. Kerrawyn had to take second place until she returned. Meanwhile David Golding, son Lewis and a shipwright friend sailed Kerrawyn back from Strahan to Cygnet. Anastasia Konstantinidis arrived home a few weeks later and the real work began.
It’s taken them seven years of hard physical work to restore it, including replacing the well (where the fish would have been kept) with a warm, comfortable cabin. In the process of restoring it, “We took away five tandem trailer loads of rubbish, including old rusty iron tanks, old engines, other tanks, fibreglass tanks. The area of the well was lined with fibreglass and foam insulation which had had fish guts, shark oil etc in it for years and years. There was also a lot of concrete which we had to chip out.” Extra work was added when, at the 2015 Australian Wooden Boat Festival, the top of the main mast broke off.
The restoration, however, was a labour of love for both of them, although it took Anastasia a bit longer than David to fall in love with the boat. “You had to have a very special pair of glasses to see the end product,” said Golding with a laugh. Importantly though, “We’ve managed to do it all without going into debt because we can do it all ourselves. That’s probably why it’s taken so long.”
They have also maintained relationships with the Young family and the Purdon families. “It makes it really worthwhile to make that connection and be a part of the Kerrawyn family.”
The Kerrawyn has gone to Franklin to replace the Yukon for trips down the Huon River. But both Konstantinidis and Golding have other plans as well, including charter trips tailored for events such as birthday parties, bird watching groups or sunset cruises complete with gin tasting. They also want to do longer trips of two to three days into the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, to Bruny Island and as far south as Recherche Bay, in the process giving a wonderful old wooden boat a renewed sense of purpose.
For more information about Kerrawyn and to book a trip, go to sailkerrawyn.com.au.
Pen Tayler is a Tasmanian writer and photographer. She photographed 12 towns for Towns of Tasmania, written by Bert Spinks, and has written and provided images for Hop Kilns of Tasmania (both Forty South Publishing). She has also written a book about Prospect House and Belmont House in the Coal River Valley.
