Innovative boatbuilder and founder of Mackay Boats leaves an outstanding legacy of success
by Mackay Boats/Sail-World NZ 12 Dec 00:25 UTC
Jim Mackay racing his L class Tamarau in the Lipton Cup © Mackay Family archives
One of New Zealand's top boat builders, Jim Mackay passed away in early November, aged 91yrs.
A racing sailor, Jim Mackay was initially best known through the 1960's as a builder of wooden racing dinghies first for the singlehanded Olympic Finn class and then the two man Olympic Flying Dutchman class, using cold moulded veneer construction.
Jim Mackay was one of the first in New Zealand to develop production runs of wooden boats - including 10 for the 1977 OK Dinghy Worlds at Takapuna, New Zealand.
He founded Mackay Boats, now recognised as one of the world's leading builders in the Olympic and high performance classes with a record of 38 Olympic medal wins and 152 medals won in Olympic classes at world championship level.
Two of his sons, Dave and Owen Mackay share some insights into Jim's prolific boat-building days and treasured photos:
He was born on Auckland’s North Shore in 1933 and lived just a stone’s throw from the waters of Shoal Bay on Auckland harbour. His great-grandfather, Richard Mackay was a leading shipbuilder in Auckland after emigrating from Scotland in the 1860s. His father Doug was a marine engineer in merchant shipping and his uncle Jim Mackay, along with Doug raced mullet boats out of the Ponsonby Cruising Club in the 1930s.
Jim’s determination to go boating started early and as a young lad in the war years when everything was scarce and materials for boatbuilding were hard to come by, his solution was to shape up canoes out of corrugated iron. The sheet of iron would be hammered flat, the ends folded up to form a bow and stern, and tar off the road would be gathered to seal the joints. Job done! Jim was boating.
In his teens Jim immersed himself in racing yachts - P class, Z class, Idle-alongs, sailing out of Takapuna Boating club at Bayswater. He represented Auckland in the Tanner Cup for P Class and in the Cornwall Cup in Zeddies.
He left school at 16 to start an apprenticeship in boatbuilding with Chas Bailey on the Auckland waterfront. Pretty soon he was building boats for himself and others out of the garage of his parent’s house in Eversleigh Rd.
Jim married Mavis in 1958 and had 4 sons, David, Owen, Stuart and Sheridan. Boatbuilding shifted to the back room of their Calliope Rd, Devonport house where he built the first Finns leading up to the 1960 Olympics in Rome, Peter Spencer and Ralph Roberts both winning national titles in Jim’s boats.
Jim built the boats he had a passion for. In the 1960s he raced Flying Dutchmen and built the boats for most of his competitors. The class in NZ went ahead in leaps and bounds with close racing and continual development culminating in Jim and Bob Wilkinson winning the 1964 Nationals and Helmer Pedersen and Earle Wells winning the Olympic Gold medal in Tokyo. It was an illustration of what close racing and a wave of collective energy could achieve.
The boatbuilding medium of the day was cold moulded timber consisting of 3 or more layers of veneer or thin plank glued together over a wooden mould. Sometimes fore and aft stringers were incorporated into the hull during moulding, as with keelboats, mullet boats and surfboats, but in other boats, particularly racing sailing dinghies, the hull came off the mould as just a timber skin with the frames and stringers added later. This enabled the hull to be “tweaked” to meet the design measurements.
In 1963 Jim’s expanding boatbuilding business was relocated to a factory in Sunnybrae Rd, Glenfield just down the road from the young family’s new house. Jim worked hard to support his family and ventured into surfboats, launches, keelboats, racing power boats while still building FDs and Finns as well as OK Dinghies, 18 footers, Contenders and Solings.
Jim built and raced 18 footers in the early days of the class when they needed four crew on the wire to manage the power. He later built the state of the art, Bruce Far designed, Travelodge for Terry and Kim McDell in which they, along with Peter Brooke, won the 1974 JJ Giltinan Trophy in Auckland, with a race to spare.
Jim’s innovation really came to the fore when he started racing powerboats in the 70s. He quickly figured out that offshore power boats needed a specific rocker curve coupled with the deep V to reduce wetted area and make them controllable in rough seas. He developed a new method of construction involving deep internal girders running fore and aft bonded to the hull with a heavy epoxy glass laminate. His boats could be pushed to the limit and won five North Island driver’s championships in a row, not least of which was Jim’s own boat in which he won seven out of nine races that season with Richard Mitri.
Owen Mackay has restored one of those boats and races it competitively on the North Island circuit.
The mainstay of Jim’s boatbuilding business throughout his career was surf boats and surf canoes. He loved the athleticism of the sport and joined Muriwai SLSC and rowed in one of their boat crews. The boats were built in triple skin veneer which meant thousands of staples which had to be pulled out between layers. Most of the family can remember having blisters at one time or another from pulling staples down at the factory. Jim and Mavis lived in Australia for a few years in the late 80s and early 90s where they built surfboats on a friend’s farm for the Australian surf clubs.
In the late 90s Jim decided that he wanted to get back into sailing mullet boats in which his family had great tradition. He bought Tamatea and press ganged his sons and a couple of other likely starters as crew. They didn’t win the first Lipton Cup they sailed in and soon Mavis and Jim were laying down the planks of a new mullet boat, designed by Jim named Tamarau meaning 4 sons. Jim and the boys went on to win the Lipton Cup in 2000 in this fast and innovative boat and over the ensuing years Jim won it another 6 times with some of Auckland’s top sailors joining him on board Tamarau.
Jim left a legacy of a lifetime in boatbuilding.
The skills and knowledge he passed on to his sons continues at Mackay Boats today, culminating in a record to date of 36 Olympic medals and 152 World Championship medals.
Jim Mackay's legacy of success is set to continue in January at the 2024 Int Moth Worlds where Bieker Moths from Mackay Boats finished second overall and with seven competitors in the top 10 overall. Mackays won six of the top places overall in the 2021 Int Moth Worlds.