But local resident Dick Guard, now aged 89, remembers a time when the town, more than 60km inland from Timaru, was a busy boatbuilding hub – where a small factory buzzed with the sounds of men painstakingly crafting vessels ranging from just a couple of metres to over 18m in length.
Few people know the story of Fairlie’s short but remarkable period as a boatbuilding mecca in the late 1940s and early 1950s, nor the links between the people there and the CWF Hamilton team further up the road at Irishman Creek Station, which was the base for the fledgling Hamilton Jet empire.
Dick’s father, Stan Guard, was a boatbuilder from Pelorus Sound in the Marlborough Sounds who moved to Fairlie in the 1930s to marry and work as a sawmiller and then as a linen flax engineer during the war years. But word of Stan’s boatbuilding background spread, and he was asked to build a clinker dinghy for a mate who worked in the
