A mile in the shoes of a wooden boat restorer
We speak with Bruny Island’s Alex Jerrim about his lifelong fascination with the water and his obsession with rebuilding a 1976 wooden boat.
Alex Jerrim has always just loved boats. He remembers spending hours at the beach at Sandy Bay on his own as a little kid, off in his own maritime world.
“I would have been four or five years old, and even at that young age, I’d go to the beach on my own and I had an apple box stored under a tree. I’d sit in that and pretend I was in boats. I just developed this fascination with wooden boats!”
His first real boat was “a glorified square surfboard that would sink within five minutes”. He then moved to a sabot – a small, flat-bottomed sailing dinghy – before trying a 12ft version.
His passion for boats only grew. He was determined to have a bigger boat, and his mum came through with a piece of advice that would change his world.
“My mother always said, ‘Darling, if you can read, you can do anything’. And I said, ‘Can I build a boat?’ And she said, ‘Of course you can.’
“So at age 14, I started to build myself this 16ft sailing boat. I finished that when I was about 18 – so over about a four-year period – and kept that for many years, and introduced my kids to sailing in it.”
Over his school years Alex would spend all his spare time at Jock Muir’s Battery Point boatyard, hoping to make a career of boat building.
“I used to ride my bicycle there nearly every night, and just sit there and look at the boats being built. They offered me a job there, but Jock convinced my father that there was no future in wooden-boat building, because this was the late ’60s, early ’70s – and he was right at the time; they were becoming a thing of the past as everything went to fibreglass and various composite materials.
Meaning well, they talked him out of his dream career. Instead, Alex had a long, fulfilling one with the police, eventually specialising in driver education then turning to consulting. But he was always making something out of wood with his hands – be it an historic boat or an entire house.
Now living on Bruny Island, and with a little bit more spare time, he is focused on his first love: those beautiful wooden boats.
At last count, Alex and his friend had poured approximately 4000 hours of love and care into Taitoa, a 1976 boat built from kauri wood in New Zealand. A Herreshoff Nereia, she circumnavigated the world with her second owners, New Zealanders Robert and Lesley Swan. They eventually settled on Bruny Island, and after Taitoa changed hands a few times she landed with Alex. She was “a tired, very sad, dilapidated but very beautiful little boat”. He enlisted a shipwright mate, and together they’re restoring it – slowly.
“We worked out at one stage we had done an hour of sailing for every thousand hours of work we’ve done. It’s a labour of love!”
In February, the Australian Wooden Boat Festival returns to Hobart. This year’s theme is the Pacific, and boats from Hawaii, Tahiti, New Zealand, Cook Islands, New Caledonia, Japan and the US West Coast will join locally made ones along the Hobart docks.
Alex will be there, as will the Swans, who will sail up to the festival on Taitoa with Alex and another former owner, a surgeon from Western Australia.