An Epic Resto-version
The restoration and conversion of the cruiser Kunara is a stand out for Wal and Chris McCadames
Throughout their lives Wal and Chris McCadames have owned and restored everything from rowing dinghies to putt-putts, launches and trawlers. Many of these wooden boats were near derelict and would have been lost forever without the skills, care and love that Wal and Chris lavished upon them. By the early 1980s, Wal and Chris McCadames had a number of restoration under their belts and undertook a project to convert a partly stripped-down 34-foot work boat into a comfortable family cruiser.
Their acquisition of the boat was quite novel. At the time they owned Beguine
However, a very good friend needed some funds for a business deal, so he asked Wal and Chris to swap the eminently saleable Beguine for a not-at-all-saleable work boat he owned. The challenge of the work boat appealed, so the swap was done.
The boat had been built in 1980 by Lennie Cunningham as a lobster trap boat at Umina on the NSW Central Coast. “He built it in a paddock next door to the house where the proposed owner lived. Lennie was a very good boatbuilder. If you needed a bit of 3 by 2, he would use a 6 by 4 — his boats were always over-timbered,” Wal said.
Christened Glen Sharen, it weighed 22.5 tonnes when it was put in the water by two cranes before being tied up at the end of the Booker Bay Marina so Lennie could start working on it with the owner.
“A year later it was put on the market and my friend bought it. The engine was a 78hp MWM which is a Spanish Mercedes motor. It was an excellent motor, individual pots for each of the six cylinders. My mate was a tug skipper and could put Glen Sharen anywhere — it was a lovely thing to drive. It pivoted around its centre line so you could come up to a wharf at 90 degrees and just spin it into place. It was round bilge, a little bit inclined to roll when empty, as it was designed to be full of water through its three huge tanks to keep lobsters alive,” Wal said.
Glen Sharen had a small aft wheelhouse when Wal and Chris acquired it and the first thing Wal did was to draw up designs for a larger forward wheelhouse and cabin. He sketched out a number of alternatives to see which looked best and would meet their expectations for staying onboard. Around this time, the boat was re-named Kunara which means 'Number One' in an Aboriginal dialect.
THE REBUILD BEGINS
Early in 1984, Wal began the refurbishment project. The major challenge was to replace the aft wheelhouse with a larger combined cabin and wheelhouse, to be located further forward. Wal knew this would move the balance of the boat and possibly change the running angle of the hull. He loaded up the bow with ballast to see what effect that might have, then he cruised up and down the Parramatta River at Meadowbank with Chris taking photos from the wharf. Those images allowed him to evaluate how the boat would trim when the new cabin was fitted.
By June 1984 Wal had started on the new cabin, taking a rather innovative approach to its construction. To start the build, he fitted two Oregon planks to the curve of the deck that could be bolted to the required width of the wheelhouse. He then put up one of the vertical uprights before trimming the boat horizontally and vertically with a spirit level to establish a plumb line. He cut a sheet of ply for his starting pattern so that the cabin would not lean either forward or back.
Building the cabin on the boat would have been difficult and time consuming, so Wal built it at home in his backyard as the cabin was too big to fit in his workshop. Wal worked the diagonals, length and height, then proceeded to build the wheelhouse in a way that could be disassembled like an Ikea flat pack. When it was finished, Wal took the flat pack to the waterfront and stacked it on the boat at the old Meadowbank Wharf. The various parts were epoxied together and the whole structure has stood the test of time.
Wal kept the original wheelhouse and controls in place while he developed his new cabin so that he could still operate Kunara. Wal noted, “When you own a boat like this you have to move it at least once a fortnight. I needed to do more than that anyway, but any boat left idle rapidly starts to deteriorate.”
The next step was to move the steering and throttle/shift controls forward into the new cabin before the fun of removing the old wheelhouse could begin. With help from a neighbour, Wal used a wrecking bar to attack the old structure, which was still very solid and heavy. The 10mm toughened glass windows alone weighed a great deal, so they cut the wheelhouse in half and rolled it onto the Wharf.
“We ended up with the old cabin on the wharf and a dirty big hole in the aft deck. We had done it all in one morning and afterwards we just sat there and had a sandwich while I’m thinking, "What have I done?!” Wal said.
He used cast iron weights as ballast in the aft bilges to counter the loss of the wheelhouse. He built a frame specially so they wouldn’t sit on the bilge timbers. Wal did some more sea trials to see how low the bow might run with the new cabin in place and was quite happy with the way the boat trimmed.
NEW CABIN FIT-OUT
Time and the project rolled on and by December 1984 Wal was well into fitting out the new cabin, including the development of a new galley aft on the starboard side. All the locks were top-quality brass from Jacksons in Tasmania and the windows had been glazed and installed with black acid-cured silicone.
In the cabin, Wal made a hatch and stairway down to both the engine room and to a cabin under the aft deck where he put a double bed. The stairway was covered by a small trunk cabin extending out from the back of the main cabin.
Along the forward section of the port side of the cabin, Wal built a dinette, which turned out to be a ‘Mark 1’ version with a settee running fore-aft along the cabin side. Wal was also busy down in the engine room where he paneled both sides in Formica-covered ply with the freshwater tanks installed behind. The generous size of the engine room made working there comparatively comfortable.
Further back toward the transom, the aft deck where the old wheelhouse used to be was filled in, and hatches were installed on either side. These were hinged along their aft edge so that they could be opened at the front to take in air and provide ventilation into the double-berth cabin.
The fit out of the galley went through two stages. At first, the plan was to use electric appliances and these were installed. However, further consideration changed the stove/oven to gas on the main basis that, as Wal said, “Every time I wanted to boil the kettle for a cup of tea, I didn’t want to have to first fire up the generator.”
A 12V fridge/freezer took care of food storage supplemented by a clever icebox that Wal fitted at the port-front of the cabin. “I used the stainless steel bowl of an old Hoover Twin Tub washer which already had a useful drain in the bottom. I built a frame with insulation and plumbed the drain overboard through a loop to form a water trap to help further insulate the icebox. It’s a great set-up and the ice lasts for up to a week! I put one of these in most of our boats,” Wal said.
Opposite the galley, in the aft port corner of the cabin, Wal put the toilet (head, to be more nautically correct). This was entered from the cockpit through its door on the back bulkhead of the cabin.
Wal decided he wasn’t entirely happy with the ‘Mark 1’ dinette he’d made with the settee. He therefore changed it so that the one fore-aft settee was replaced by two smaller transverse settees, which were easier to get in and out of. A clever point is that under the carpet beside the dinette was an engine room hatch made from 5/8 inch Perspex. Even when closed, with the carpet rolled away it allowed in lots of light to help working below.
HARD WORK PAYS OFF
After six years of hard work on Kunara, and with much enjoyment derived along the way for themselves along with family and friends, Wal and Chris sold the cruiser on the 31st October 1990 to a new owner in Gladstone, Queensland. He was a bit of a character and changed the name to the Happy Hooker and it became quite famous as a dive excursion vessel. Later it was owned by a professional fisherman who took the boat to Cairns and built a garfishing business with the boat, doing so for some 19 years.
“Every time we went to Cairns, we’d go looking for it and on one trip we saw it when it had been re-named back to Kunara. We saw it again in July 2018 after it had been run up on a reef and had been backed into a fuel barge resulting in damage to starboard transom quarter. It was disappointing to see it like that — damaged and dirty. It’s not a real old boat after being built in just 1980. And it was such a wonderful boat too!” Wal said.
And that’s the tale of Kunara. Sincere thanks to Wal and Chris McCadames for providing all the information and photos so that the story of this unique vessel could be featured. And congratulations to them on all the superb work that made it such a marvellous family boat.