Family Affair

Whakatāne is known as a fisherman’s paradise, and on any day the weather is good and the tide is right you’ll see a steady stream of boats heading out across the bar to catch kai moana. And there is a good chance that many of them will have been made just up the road.

SINCE 1993 SURTEES BOATS has been turning out some of the smoothest riding fishing boats in the world, thanks to their deep V hulls and rigid construction. The Surtees factory, located between Whakatāne and Kawerau, has workshops to handle pretty much every aspect of boatbuilding, but central to it all - and to the boats themselves - is aluminium welding, more of an artform than a trade, and not something for the faint-hearted!

Surtees boats have an incredibly strong and robust hull construction, with six fully-welded under-floor stringers running the length of the hull, a fully welded tread plate alloy floor and fully sealed buoyancy chambers along the length of the hull. Expertly welded aluminium means weight is kept to a minimum, but strength is retained, and we don’t use the term ‘expertly’ lightly: each and every Surtees boat is built by one welder from start to finish, who then signs the hull proudly with his own initials.

“Back in the day most boat builders gave you a couple of bungs and a slap on the back,” says Cliff, “But when you buy a Surtees boat it’s not the end of the story it’s just the beginning.”

These boats are built with pride and passion andnot pushed through a production line; as the company motto goes, “Surtees are making their way around the globe, one perfect weld at a time”.

The story of Surtees going global begins however, like all good Kiwi stories, in a shed. Neil Surtees, the man behind the name, never set out to build an internationally renowned company that employs nearly 50 people - he just wanted a boat to go fishing in. “I was a boilermaker by trade,” Neil says, “and I just wanted a boat that was capable of crossing the Whakatāne bar to get out fishing. I knew welding and I’d built a couple of jet boats. So I knew what I wanted and just went for it.”

What he’d noticed from studying other boats was that most manufacturers just transposed a design from one material to another. “Most people just built a wooden boat in aluminium, but the difference in weight means that doesn’t really work. To take advantage of the benefits of aluminium you need a new design, something that means the boat is smooth at high speed and stable at low speed or at rest because of the stabilising ballast system.”

Normally this would involve months of computer assisted design and prototyping, but Surtees came up with the ballast system and deep V hull combination all by eye and, remarkably, he was on the money first time. “If it looks right, then it probably is right,” he says with the enviable understatement of someone who really knows what the hell they are doing. That first boat caught the eye of a local who commissioned one for himself, word spread, and the rest as they say is history. The company has now picked up numerous international awards and last year alone they turned out around 350 boats that are chasing tight lines locally and abroad.

And yet Surtees Boats remains a very down to earth, very Kiwi company at heart. The ‘head office’ is in fact the former Surtees family home and so instead of corporate glitz there is a smoko room with fishing magazines, and on a doorframe there are dozens of marks charting the heights of Surtees kids and kids of staff members who have been part of the Surtees story.

One of those staff members is Cliff Schick, who has been with Surtees for more than 20 years. When Cliff arrived the site was an apple orchard and his first job was knocking that down; he has now left the chainsaw behind and assumed the role of General Manager. “So much has changed,” he says, “and so quickly. Take the state-ofthe-art router cutter for instance. They are all computer controlled and work to a preprogrammed template that is accurate to 0.1mm accuracy. In the old days we used to cut the plates on the floor with a Skilsaw!”

Another thing that has changed is the level of after-sales support. “Back in the day most boat builders gave you a couple of bungs and a slap on the back,” says Cliff, “But when you buy a Surtees boat it’s not the end of the story it’s just the beginning. We kind of like to think that when you buy a Surtees you’re joining the family - so much so that customers are warned not to be surprised if they see someone sticking their head under their boat at the boat ramp - it will just be one of the welders checking to see if it’s one of theirs!”