The great river of waiting

Owen Moorhouse recalls building an ‘unsinkable’ canoe from sheet metal and endeavouring to master the wild Whanganui River on it

- Owen Moorhouse

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Owen Moorhouse’s lifetime of yachting experience began as a teenager when he built his first 11ft Vee Jay. Since then he has owned various yachts and, at 93 years of age, still lives aboard Sandpiper, a 38ft Roberts sloop on Pittwater, just north of Sydney. In his youth he canoed wild rivers in Australia and New Zealand in craft he built himself. Since then, he has sailed much of the east coast of Australia, often single-handed, and still carries out a lot of his own maintenance and alterations aboard. He has bare-boated in Corsica, Greece, South of France and crewed in the Aegean and Tasman seas.

The year was 1949 when my teenage brother and I built an ‘unsinkable’ canoe from sheet metal and called it Illawarra. We transported it by ship from Australia to New Zealand and set out to canoe the Whanganui river – a stunning river valley reserve which is now a premier wilderness destination for canoeing and kayaking enthusiasts.

Back then, other than the local Maori people, few had contemplated canoeing its length and certainly not for adventure. We had no maps, but over the course of 10 days we canoed a river bigger than we had ever known.