THE LEGEND OF WHAI

“Yeah,” says skipper John Ellwood affectionately, “she’s like your favourite old tractor, she just keeps going and going.”

Steaming into the bay on Aotea Great Barrier Island, MV (motor vessel) Whai looks like a floating World War 1 army tank, a Mk1 perhaps, squat and imperturbable.

But it was another war that played a key role in her construction in a Whanganui back yard. Locally born and raised WW2 fighter pilot Peter Spurdle had flown Warhawk (Kittyhawk) fighters for the US Air Force and strafed a Japanese gunboat fleet in the New Georgia Islands.

In 1965, 22 years later, he joined the crew of a ketch, , to return to the site of the attack to look for souvenirs. The yacht didn’t impress him at all. “For weeks now, the had been rolling along,” he wrote in his book . “What I think and say about sailing craft would make a yachtie