Sing or swim!

Two years ago, Adrian - a Melbourne businessman - was in Japan looking at purchasing a selection of earthmoving equipment to bring back to Australia. Sitting in the dock at Kobe was a sadly neglected Japanese-built 52ft motoryacht. He asked if the boat could be included with the deal.

Inside it was decked out with all the technology of its era. It had a large video screen, a karaoke machine and, in keeping with the Japanese cultural tradition, a bath.

Adrian found it needed a new generator to get it going and that it had been refitted with Komatsu engines at some stage. Other documents suggested work of some kind had been carried out in Florida, USA.

The vessel was loaded onto a container boat and shipped to Geelong, Victoria. Upon arrival in Australia it was unloaded with the heavy earthmoving equipment and placed in a berth at Williamstown's Pier 35.

In the ensuing months Mike, another Melbourne businessman, and his family had often been out on the boat with Adrian. Not long after, Mike heard Adrian mention he had been inspired to purchase a brand-new 65 motoryacht through a dealer in New South Wales. This meant he had decided to trade off the 52-footer.

"I rang him and offered what I thought to be a fair price and he said 'Yep, she's all yours'," said Mike.

Mike then dropped it back into the water and drove it to Pier 35 where he left it for a few months.

"I tied the jetski on the back of it and my wife, myself and our children used it like you couldn't imagine. We realised it was fairly mechanically sound."

Then while inspecting the interior one day Mike, to his surprise, found some Japanese brochures inside a cupboard.

From the brochures it turned out that the craft Mike had affectionately called Gloria was in fact the Hiromi.

It had been run as a corporate charterboat in the smaller southern islands near the major Japanese island of Kyushu by the Kouyama Marine Company since the early 1990s.

Translated into English, the text on the glossy Japanese colour brochures conjured up images of a tropical playground paradise. They offered cruises and sightseeing on the Hiromi around Tanagashima Island for up to 12 passengers.

Along with this text, together with images of sunsets, underwater scenes and 19-year-old female models draped around the deck, were the words: "Let's go cruising among the southern islands! The Hiromi is like a fish that plays all around these seas."

You could imagine the sake flowing with loads of fresh sushi while guests onboard attempted yet another bad English version of Yellow Submarine on the karaoke machine!

BACK TO REALITY
Despite the hype contained in the exotic brochures the 52ft cruiser was in a fairly neglected state by the time Mike got hold of it. After 10 years of use, the 'playful fish,' was looking a little worn around the gills.

"It must have been the flagship of the fleet because they'd done such a huge brochure on it," said Mike. "It's got Komatsu engines in it so it's a little bit unusual. I'd suggest that it was a construction company or a Komatsu dealer or something. It's unusual to spec a boat with those types of engines."

With all the deluxe trappings of a Japanese corporate boat it had satellite phone, satellite fax and all those other fancy bits and pieces.

"It had a karaoke machine in it in the aft cabin. There was a large video screen, and all these toys for 1991 would have been extravagant. But these days with modern digital technology, all that stuff's basically obsolete," said Mike.

However in compiling information for this story one thing remained unclear - the exact origin of the boat. So I sent a picture of the 'Karaoke Boat' to Michael Joyce at 7 Seas Motor Cruisers in Mosman, New South Wales to ask his opinion on where it was made.

"It looks to me like a Horizon 52, and it would have been built in Taiwan," he said.

Ted Yang, sales manager at the Horizon Yacht Company in Kaohsiung, Taiwan was able to shed more light.

"There were two dealers in Japan selling Horizon boats," he said. "One called Infinity and another called Gloria. Our Horizon 52 series is usually called the Pantera."

So from this information it seemed safe to conclude that the craft is what Yang refers to as "a certificated NK-class" Gloria 52 - one of a limited number of Horizon craft badged as Gloria or Infinity.

While Yang helped clear up the likely origins of the SS Hiromi, Mike continued to refer to the craft affectionately as Gloria.

After taking over the boat and using it extensively with his family, Mike decided that he wanted to refurbish it thoroughly.

"The most expensive part of renovating boats is labour," he said. "I'm a diesel mechanic by trade so I pulled all the old junk off and paid professionals to put all the new junk on and that's how it evolved.

"The economics of it is very sound. As you can well imagine a 50-55ft boat is in the vicinity of a $600,000 boat and it probably owes us in retrospect probably 40 per cent of that - so it's worth doing."

Mike recalled how he got the urge to "debug", as he puts it, the Hiromi.

"My kids were fishing at Pier 35," he explained. "They were breaking muscles off the jetty and there was a 45ft Riviera beside us. It was a very nice boat and there was a mechanic working on it, so we got talking and it had a magnificent big boarding platform on the back of it.

"I told him I really liked the boarding platform and he said he was removing it because a couple of gamefish had ended up under it when he was backing up to catch them. So I asked what he'd want to sell it."

Mike bought the boarding platform and that's how it all began. He then decided to "debug" the boat as it was 10 years old and in need of a makeover.

"We pulled it out of the water and put a bowthruster in it, which I fitted myself. The fibreglass people did some work on it, and at this stage we're just pulling the electrics out and putting digital equipment in."

In addition, Mike had to resort to using a chainsaw to remove the bath.

"The hull is very sound and it's such a spacious boat. I spoke to a lot of dealers and wholesale suppliers at the Brisbane boat show about refitting the interior and putting in a new shower and toilet."

In the process he also removed the karaoke machine and the onboard stereo.

"In 1991 the stereo was huge - all that large stuff and wires everywhere. I filled the back of my ute at least half a dozen times with all the old cabling."

Of course now that we're in the digital era all the old analogue systems also had to go. This reduced the number of transponders hanging off the boat from 12 to just one.

"We're going to put the new Raymarine stuff in. We've investigated all that - basically it's a digital system, so the compactness of it all is superb," said Mike.

GETTING INNER & OUTER
While he was having the interior refitted, Mike employed two other experts - Neil Hancock at Aussie Boat Covers and Peter Van Summeren at Auto Marine Fibreglass - to help restore the exterior.

Van Summeren joked about his company's role in the restoration of the 'Karaoke Boat.'

"Well, perhaps it's something like making a silk purse out of a sow's ear!" he said. "Really, it's a refurbishment job because cosmetically it was very neglected. It was a task aimed at bringing it back to the condition a boat of that size and standard should be in.

"We found a couple of problems once we started on it and initially the owner just said he wanted the boat repainted and a couple of things changed on the swim platform. It wasn't until we took the exhaust cowls off that we realised the whole side of the hull had been burned.

"It was burnt from the exhaust temperature. It had burnt out all the resin out of the fibreglass and was close to catching fire, I'd say. I wouldn't have liked to have driven it to Sydney and back because I don't think it would have made it."

The team at Auto Marine Fibreglass worked mainly on the hull and below the waterline once the vessel arrived at Patterson Lakes Marina from Pier 35.

"There was no structural work apart from replacing the side of the hull and places where it was burned - but no, we did nothing above the deck line," said Van Summeren.

The flybridge has also had a revamp through Neil Hancock at Aussie Marine Covers, located next to Van Summeren at Patterson Lakes.

"Mike needed to get the electronics on the flybridge done. That was the first job that we did - to weatherproof the flybridge," said Hancock. "We had to fit a bimini top and a full set of flybridge clears. We used stainless-steel framework; 25mm tube with stainless-steel fittings. We also fitted a solid Sunbrella canvas windscreen cover on the boat for added protection.

"I guess this craft is unusual to us because we don't see a lot of the product that comes out of that part of the world. We're more used to the Riviera, Bertram, Caribbean, Sea Ray style of thing."

Mike initially thought it would be a six-month project, but it turned out there's still much to do. He tries to find time between business and family activities to work on it.

"The rear deck will go back on, the jetski will go back on and the dinghy will go back on," he said. "Then the interior of the floating timber floors will be put in. We've put in timber bunks in the front because of our children and we'll make it usable again.

"I could put the boat back in the water soon. We'll just have to see how we go with the building industry - all the cabinet makers are so busy.

"Building a boat is tough because a boat has all those bends. You just can't go in and measure it - you have to make templates of everything and that's the only way you can do it. We'll probably put another $20,000 into the interior and we could end up with a pretty nice boat for that price."

ODDS ON SUCCESS
Although Mike laughs and says getting the boat in the first place was "a bit of misadventure", the day will certainly come when he will be considering selling it once his four children have grown up. The odds are that this could turn out to be a rather nice investment return when he does.

"But it's a great boat because whoever originally ordered it got large prop shafts put on it. It's also got big props and big rudders and all those things make it very manoeuvrable - you can go forward to reverse and I've put a bowthruster on it to make it a little more easy to handle.

"We'll put a TV in because, as a family, that's the way we use the boat. We don't go out for two hours and come back in. We normally jump on the boat in the afternoon and we'll anchor off one of the beaches and stay overnight. It's the best view of Melbourne that you could ever imagine.

"You sit out on the water and the water splashes on your boat 100m off the shore. It's just magnificent!"

So from the slick corporate-tourist cruiser in the Pacific, the 'Karaoke Boat' Hiromi is now likely to spend the second decade of its life with a new name as a family leisure boat in the Southern Hemisphere.

The vessel could not hope for a better retirement plan. If it could talk it would probably only say one thing about it's new life: "Hai! Sugoi desu yo!" Or in a language we can all understand, "Yes! That's great!"