Tale Of Two Stabis

Returning from a fishing trip in the Hauraki Gulf, Scott Lacey of Whangaparoa and two mates were amazed to find a 3.1m Stabi-Craft still attached to its trailer, filled with sand and rock.

“Halfway back to the peninsula my mate spotted what he originally thought to be a whale just under the surface of the water,” Lacey said.

“When we got closer we realised that it was a mostly submerged Stabi-Craft.”

One of the group sat inside bailing out the sand, water and rocks as they towed the boat back to shore.

The salvaged Stabi-Craft now has a new motor and a new lease of life.

But this isn’t the only story in which a wayward Stabi-Craft bucked the odds and rode the currents to a new home.

Radio 4BC Brisbane recently aired an interview with a New South Wales fisherman named Wally, whose fishing tale had earlier been verified by Stabi-Craft Marine.

Wally said he’d been on an unsuccessful fishing expedition off the central coast of NSW when the group decided to check out the coordinates of a ‘shipping hazard’ 10 miles from shore that had been radioed in from another boat.

Once there they found an upturned boat with the rusted remnants of its outboard mounting still attached. They flipped the object right side up and towed it to shore, where they chipped away two wheelbarrow loads of barnacles to unveil a Stabi-Craft, which turned out to be a tender that had been lost overboard off the south coast of NZ two years earlier.

The boat had been carried in the southern ocean current from New Zealand to New South Wales.

“We turned it upright, put it back in the water and we’ve been fishing out of it ever since,” Wally said.