The amazing journey of a Bar Crusher that just wouldn’t sink

Sydney’s David Nash told boatsales.com.au today that a New Zealand-based journalist had contacted him on Tuesday to say the now almost unrecognisable, barnacle-encrusted boat had washed ashore on the eastern tip of New Zealand’s North Island.

Even more amazingly, the the 150hp Suzuki outboard engine on the Bar Crusher 615C that Nash had owned only for about a month had suffered only cosmetic damage – the prop still spins freely, the gearbox still functions, the steering rack turns lock to lock, and the piston moves in the cylinder – and even the key still turns in the ignition.

Only the windscreen, rocket launcher and seats were missing. The boat even still contained most of Nash’s fishing gear.

Nash, a member of the SeaBees Fishing Club based in the Hills area of Sydney, said he thought the boat was lost after he last saw it from the cockpit of the rescue helicopter that had plucked him and his mate, Barry Mainsbridge, out of the water about 45 minutes after it capsized.

Nash’s insurance company even went looking for the boat, he said, but after a couple of days of searching made the call that the boat, like others, had ended up becoming another victim of The Peak.

>> The amazing survival story of a fishing boat that sank at The Peak

The story of how the boat that washed up at Henderson Bay in New Zealand was traced back to Nash is even more surprising.

“I’d bought it when it was 18 months old and the incident occurred about a month after I’d had it, so she was a young boat,” Nash said.

“It was originally supplied Blakes Marine in Windsor, so the life jackets still were wrapped in their Blakes Marine plastic covers.

“But what came out, and how they found me, was a stubbie holder from the SeaBees Fishing Club that we’d had made for us. As soon as it came out they [the people who tried to find out who owned the boat] went straight onto the website, sent an email to the generic email address on the website – which I just happened to be the administrator for the club, so it came to me.

“It basically said – it was the journos in New Zealand – ‘you missing a boat?’ I looked at the photo they sent and thought ‘no, it’s not mine’, but then I had a closer look and said ‘Jesus!’

“I was so pleased to know where she’d ended up; I’d presumed she had sunk.”

Nash said a “number of things” had contributed to the boat unexpectedly swamping and capsizing.

“You have to have more than one error occur [for something like this to happen],” he said. Nash said the current was going the wrong way against the swell, and the anchor rope fouled in the prop as it was going down.

With the current pushing us one way, the swell going the other, and with the rear of the boat towards the swell and the anchor dragging, Nash and Mainsbridge had a big wave come through that filled the Bar Crusher's cockpit. At the same time, the anchor grabbed and pulled the stern under.

"So it was about a second and a half ... it [the boat] just tossed us out unceremoniously, got the EPIRB, set it off – it was a day that I was very happy to live in Australia where we have good services.”

Nash said he’d investigated the way the Pacific currents run to try and gauge where the boat had travelled before turning up in remote northern New Zealand.

“It’s hard for me not to think that the Eastern Australian Current had picked it up and taken it south,” he said.

“If it went south then it would have picked up a big westerly current that’s under New Zealand, and it would have almost taken it up the side of South America and come back down through the tropics.

“There were mussels and clams on it which were from the tropics, and that part of the North Island, the fellow that lives there that found it said ‘we regularly get coconuts washing up on our beach’.

“So whether or not it [the boat] made a big, snail-like spiral that took it that way … I dunno.”

Nash said the boat’s new New Zealand owner planned to get it back on the water, and he was now waiting for an invitation to one day go out on it for a fish. “Yeah, I’d like to do that,” he said.