Ariki
Ariki’s Story
Ariki was designed by Archibald Logan and built in 1904 by Logan brothers for Charles Horton of the Horton publishing family.
Her design was based on the Logan’s brother’s successful Rainbow of 1898 as a cruiser racer, Ariki was considerably bigger and more powerful than most of the other Logan designed yachts, apart from Thelma.
Ariki was a gaff-rigged cutter with a jackyard topsail. Featuring a spoon-bowed and counter-stern, her hull was planked in copper fastened kauri, consisting of two thinner layers of planks that were diagonal to each other and the third skin of planks running horizontally fore and aft along the yacht. She featured a flush deck with no cabin top visible above the deck.
She enjoyed a dominance on the harbour for 35 years until the launching of the Lou Tercel designed and built Ranger in 1938 signalled the end of Ariki's reign of Auckland first-class racing. Up until that time she had been the scratch boat of the first class (A-class) fleet.
In 2016 Andrew and Charlotte purchased her and started an 18 month restoration, relaunching her in April 2018.
Ariki’s 2016 restoration
It was an adventure for sure. Like many of these classic yachts, Ariki had been carefully restored a number of times over her life time, and most recently in the 1980’s by three friends on their weekends over a number of years.
She was relaunched and was again part of the classic yacht fleet for many years. Unfortunately, as we often see with these boats, her owner sadly became unwell and was unable to sail her anymore, so she languished on her mooring for about 10 years.
When we purchased her and brought her into her tent on the hard stand at Akahu Bay she was 90 percent waterlogged.
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