I have a great affection for flags. In a maritime context they signal vital information and communication and, at very least, any blend of medieval colours whipping in the wind or heading a street parade create an ineffable mood of cheer and celebration.
When I was born, my navy parents were in Mediterranean Malta, an island about the size of Waiheke. Three thousand years of mankind had passed through and its people are addicted to the flags of its own spectacular military and maritime heritage.
Flags, military pomp, a young soon-to-be-Queen and the immaculately polished bronze and ice-white pipeclay aboard fastmoving navy launches throwing up sheets of spray against an azure sky were sewn into my personal genes before I could talk.
A few years later when we arrived in Devonport, my father, having transferred to the Royal New Zealand Navy, took me with him aboard his frigate, ‘decked overall’ with signal flags and anchored for the day in the middle of Auckland’s harbour; there to preside over the city’s iconic Anniversary Day Regatta.
The event brought out billowing clouds of racing canvas and the sleekly magnificent triple-skinned kauri racing yachts unique to Auckland, dominated by the mighty classic gaff-rigged A-class fleet developed by Auckland boat builders 50 years earlier (mainly in the rival Logan and Bailey boatyards) for the sporting captains of industry early in the century when kauri was the world’s most sought-after boatbuilding timber.
Also out for the day were a thousand other launches, sailing dinghies, ships lifeboats, rowing teams, commercial scows, a hundred different classes of racing vessels, sea scout cutters, waka, and generally anything else that floated.
Since then, not so much. The harbour’s vast acreage of moorings and sturdy breakwater infrastructure began to crumble. Marinas took their place – and took a toll on the availability of affordable berths for the fleets of family cruising boats that flooded the summer gulf. Building your own boat was a mania. Professional boat designers turned their talents to fast modern racers, international innovation and, for a while, to ocean racing boats.
Top brass in the Auckland ‘supercity’ bureaucracy abandoned our super-enviable City of Sails international brand for a plastic pōhutukawa flower on its letterhead and the mantras of civic administration and attrition divided the city from its waterfront.
Socially, home ownership was no longer a given. One household income no longer sufficed and access to a sea-girt good life on Auckland’s harbour was no longer a family yacht or launch or just a home-built dinghy and Seagull outboard – all of which had once rated well above the family’s fourth-hand car and time to mow the lawns.
As a consequence, the first Auckland Wooden Boat Festival two years ago seemed to startle everyone from the mayor down.
In a city battered by Covid and remorseless civic austerity, yachties and the rest of Auckland woke to a vast pageant of classic wooden boats, not sailing distantly off North Head but transforming Jellicoe Wharf – the erstwhile home of rusty steel workboats, ships waiting to be scrapped and stray shipping – into a forest of flags.
Exquisite mullet boats and mighty A-class classics with sweeping gaff rigs and not a winch in sight dozed in the sun alongside pop-up marina berths that had been towed into place for Auckland’s three-day, biennial Wooden Boat festival.
Both festivals have been free. Fully an acre of floating berths for more than 100 vessels, with more on the wharves: steam engines, tugboats, hand-crafted dinghies, boat models and craftsmen ready to share their skills with people showing interest and delight on a scale seldom seen so up close and personal.
I have a classic yacht of my own – the A-class Marangi built in 1910 in the Devonport yard of Guernsey boat builder Tom Le Huquet for his son Ted, a crack racing skipper – and we featured in the festival among other Waiheke wooden ships for perhaps the most gregarious three days of my life.
Everywhere, people wanted to talk. Curious or knowledgeable, expert or dreamer, stranger or old mate, helpful pro or a family with fond memories of a great childhood. It was the stuff of lifetimes of hard sailing, shared history and the well-loved stories of long evenings in convivial cockpits and lamp-lit saloons.
Mildly contemplating the idle flags in Sunday’s dawn, I glimpsed a sense of a purposeful network acting to mould our perceptions and life for the better with such chosen, shared and satisfying endeavours. The future may demand that of us, anyway, and for a moment an upgrade seemed possible, requiring little more than a new precision in our thinking and constructive action. Flags and history offer a smorgasbord of blueprints out there. • Liz Waters
