The Little Green Boatshed

by Guest Author Max Avery

The Little Green Boatshed, June 2017
Photograph by Fiona Kean

The subject of this article was no architectural masterpiece. Indeed, many may have called it unsightly. Yet, for nearly 50 years it was an integral part of the Tauranga foreshore. Snuggled by the Tauranga-Matapihi railway bridge it served the Yacht and Power Boat Club before it became a home for Tim Morrell and Bob Murray’s boating activities.

On July 15, 2021 at the stroke of a bureaucratic pen, the little green corrugated iron boatshed was demolished and one of the last remaining features of the old Tauranga harbour foreshore was consigned to history.

Slipway and Matapihi Rail Bridge, 7 May 2019
Photograph by Fiona Kean

Built by members of the TYPBC, the boat shed was on a reclamation, also organised by those enthusiastic yachtsmen. They needed an area handy to their clubhouse which their craft, particularly the seven-foot Tauranga class, could be rigged and launched from. Begun in 1935, the reclamation grew steadily in area over the years. A concrete slipway was poured in 1944 and some years later a manual winch installed.

Plans for a boatshed on the reclamation to house the club’s patrol boats were approved in 1963 and the building was erected by club working bees in 1974, according to club member Bill Faulkner. The club apparently had little use for the shed after 1977, when its small boat fleet became based at Kulim Park, and a new clubhouse was established at Sulphur Point in 1983.

Winch
Photo by Lee Switzer

Clubhouse custodian Tim Morrell is said to have used the boasted for storing nautical gear, and the adjacent slipway for the maintenance of his beloved mullet boat Lorna.  It became known as “Tim’s private slip.” When Tim Morrell moved on Tauranga land owner and keen fisherman Bob Murray moved in, and for many years shared the slipway and boatshed with fellow mariners and fishermen, until the Bay of Plenty Regional Council began trying to evict him. “I’ve had that shed for 30 years. It’s a mates thing,” the 84-year old told journalist Andrew Campbell in 2017, claiming that he had obtained a lease from the Tauranga City Council. “It’s between me and the council really,” he said, critical of what he called the regional council’s “bombastic attitude.”

Bob Murray was never ready to give up on his harbourside haven, and neither he did, until death parted them on August 30, 2018. The shed remained, its surroundings no longer kept tidy by Bob. The historic manual winch was wrenched from its foundations by persons unknown in September 2019. Through the efforts of members of the Tauranga Historical Society, to whom the winch had been given by the TYPBC, the artefact was recovered in February 2020 and is now safely lodged with the Tauranga Heritage Collection.

The boasted has gone and only the concrete slipway, girt by iron rails on which the wheels of the boat cradle ran, remains - a mute monument to the many happy maritime memories of past years. And of the old Strand and Dive Crescent foreshore, only the former TYPBC clubhouse (now a restaurant) and the railway wharf cargo shed continue to defy change.