Time and tide: A man, a boat, a love affair

Sunday, 18 May 2025

Restless, which Tim Beattie has owned for nearly 60 years.

Tim Beattie’s classic yacht, Restless, has been a central part of his life for nearly 60 years. Now it’s time to say goodbye. But, as he tells Mike White, he’s determined it must go to someone special.

“The noise was indescribable. Not a howling wind, but a screaming fury.” Tim Beattie in Restless’s log, 1972.

This was the worst part: The waiting.

Sitting on his yacht, Restless, Tim Beattie could feel the wind picking up, flattening the sea into submission.

Hurricane Bebe had been forecast to pass well to the west.

But then it changed course, and was now bearing right down on them, near Fiji’s capital, Suva.

Beattie and his crew had done everything they could: moved to a sheltered bay; dived to check their mooring; laid out an anchor as an emergency backup; lashed and stowed everything on deck.

Tim Beattie, left, and his mate Maurie Gray, with the Flying Dutchman they built in 1964 under Gray’s house in Auckland.

And now there was nothing to do. Except listen to the wind rise, listen to the incoming radio reports of Bebe’s destruction, and wait for all hell to break loose.

“Rain was torrential and being blown horizontal, and there was no way you could face into the wind and rain.”

Sitting on a pontoon at Auckland’s Westhaven Marina in 1968, 21-year-old Tim Beattie looked down at the 40’ kauri sloop and thought it looked perfect.

Even its name, Restless, seemed to sum up how he felt.

Beattie had grown up on Auckland’s North Shore in the 50s and 60s, and got into sailing early, racing dinghies off Takapuna Beach, building a Flying Dutchman with a mate, and learning everything he could about making yachts go faster.

“And when I finished reading all the books in the library about racing boats, the only books left were about cruising. So I started reading those.

“And I got really inspired - all these stories about people that sailed around the world.

“And I thought, gosh, that’s what I want to do.”

But real life came calling: Beattie went to university and began studying accountancy.

He hated it, so real life got shown the door.

Instead, Beattie and his high-school mate Trevor Walsh, also 21, dropped out of university, with the idea of earning enough money to buy a yacht and sail away.

So for a year, they lived in a single men’s camp at Murupara, working in the forests, “swinging an axe”, Beattie remembers.

Restless with a previous owner, in Wellington Harbour in 1951.

When they returned to Auckland, the pair pooled their money with two other friends, Bruce Bond, 22, and Roger Lawton, 20, and went looking for a yacht.

When a yacht broker mentioned Restless, they arranged to meet the owner.

So here they were, the four of them, sitting beside Restless on a Sunday afternoon, thinking what an ideal boat she would be.

“And a Rolls Royce drives up near where the boat was,” remembers Beattie, now 78, “and we thought, ‘Gee, there’s some rich guys around here.’

“And this guy gets out of the Rolls and starts walking along the dock towards us - and he’s the owner.”

The man was Maurice Relph, who’d gone from a humble stoker on navy ships to a high-flying entrepreneur with clothing factories.

Relph wanted $13,500 for Restless. Beattie and his mates had $7000.

Restless being towed down Auckland’s Fanshawe St in 1920, on her way to being launched.

“But he kind of liked the idea of some young guys taking over the boat, and he said, ‘Well, take it for a sail, and if you like the boat, you can have it for $7000.’

“And we said, ‘Fantastic - sold.’”

Restless had been constructed in Auckland by the Tercel brothers, who went on to build the famous racing yacht Ranger.

She was loaded on a timber wagon, towed to the foreshore by three horses, and launched on Good Friday 1920 - religious piety trumped by a crucial king tide.

Restless had numerous owners in the following years, was dismasted during the disastrous 1951 Wellington-Lyttelton race which saw two other yachts disappear without trace, and had already made one overseas voyage by the time Relph sold her.

“She had very little in the way of mod cons,” says Beattie, “which didn’t bother us at all.”

Instead, they had an old brass sextant Bond’s mother gave them, and Beattie studied navigation at night school, while they worked on the boat.

“As soon as we were ready to go, that was our departure date,” recalls Beattie.

That date came in February 1969, as they sailed from Auckland, their families waving on the dock behind them, a world of freedom over the horizon.

“There were no thoughts of anxiety at all,” remembers Beattie. “It was all just excited anticipation of the adventures that lay ahead.

“We weren’t worried about anything - rather foolishly, I suppose.”

“Boats were slewing around on their anchors, rolling their gunwales under, and lurching and tugging at their tiny links with the bottom of the bay.”

Ten days later, the quartet arrived in Sydney.

“We had enough money to buy a few groceries, and a few beers, but we needed to find work,” says Beattie.

So they headed to Western Australia, where Beattie worked in a bar, and the others did labouring jobs, before returning to Restless, and setting sail into the Pacific in March 1970.

Mick Harris, left, Tim Beattie, centre, and Roger Lawton on board Restless during a reunion, years after their Pacific voyage.

But by the time they got to Tonga, two of the crew decided to call it quits: Walsh was lovesick for a woman he’d met in Fiji (and later married); and Bond was seasick on every passage.

Needing another crew member, Beattie was told about Mick Harris from Rhodesia who had just come off another yacht.

“And we saw this guy walking down the dock, and he had a backpack, a speargun, and a surfboard.

“And we thought, ‘This looks hopeful.’”

Harris turned out to be the perfect replacement, and they eventually sailed Restless to Rarotonga (“We were there for 21 days and had 18 parties on the boat”), Tahiti, and Hawaii.

Beattie worked there for a year, painting houses - a trade that later became his career.

By 1972, they were heading south again, island-hopping through the Pacific, on their way home.

But there was one stop Beattie insisted on making: Suwarrow, in the Cook Islands, where legendary New Zealander Tom Neale had lived alone for years.

Tom Neale, the New Zealander who spent 16 years living alone on Suwarrow or Suvarov Island, a remote Cook Islands atoll, who wrote the book An Island to Oneself.

“We weren’t sure of the reception we’d receive. We thought this guy might tell us to bugger off, and wanted his privacy respected.

“But it turned out to be quite the opposite. He was such a welcoming guy.

“I think he put some clothes on when he saw a yacht coming through the pass, though.”

Restless arrived back in New Zealand in late 1972. They’d been away nearly four years.

But Beattie wanted more.

“In some of the lights around the place, the rain could be seen crossing the beam, looking more like smoke from a bushfire.”

Tim and Jo Beattie on Restless, crossing the Pacific in 1980.

Lawton’s girlfriend, who’d waited for him since 1969, wasn’t keen on him returning to sea.

So, after making some money painting houses, Beattie and two crew headed into the Pacific again in June 1974.

Back in Hawaii, Beattie met famed mariner John Guzzwell, who’d circumnavigated the world in his homebuilt 20’ yacht, Trekka, in the 50s.

Guzzwell encouraged Beattie to sail to Alaska, and so that’s what he did, reaching Kodiak Island, and exploring Prince William Sound’s glaciers, before making his way down the Inside Passage to Vancouver.

He spent several years working there, and in California, painting houses and living on Restless.

And in 1978 he met his future wife in San Diego.

“Jo was from the Midwest in the US and knew nothing about boats. She was from wheat and cattle country.

“But she thought she would like to go sailing, and she soon moved aboard.”

They sailed back across the Pacific: past Mururoa Atoll where France was conducting nuclear tests; back to Suwarrow where Beattie helped erect a monument to Tom Neale who had died; and back to New Zealand in November 1980.

Tim Beattie’s handwritten log of Hurricane/Cyclone Bebe in 1972.

As Beattie motored past Russell, up the channel to Ōpua in the Bay of Islands to clear customs, he sensed his 12-year odyssey was over.

He and Restless were home.

“Next day in the bar of the hotel, a hundred stories were told a hundred times, but we all agreed that it was bad, and it could have been a lot worse.”

The story of surviving Hurricane Bebe in 1972 is recorded in the log of Restless, along with innumerable other adventures.

Throughout that night, Beattie had seen flares fired from yachts that had come adrift; seen two yachts wrecked on the reef; watched the barometer plunge to 968 millibars; and endured 90-knot (166kph) winds.

Hunkered in Restless’s cabin, “Jim made a pot of popcorn, for something to do”, Beattie wrote.

Tim Beattie and his wife Jo, with their granddaughter Ella, on board Restless.

Restless rode it out, just as she had for thousands and thousands of miles across the Pacific.

Beattie had been offered a job in Russell as soon as he returned, and decided it was a good place to live, with plenty of sailing at hand.

He paid out the other three original shareholders, and lived on Restless while he and Jo built a house.

They’ve continued sailing her around the coast for 45 years since their return, including another trip to Fiji.

And Restless still swings on a mooring just off the beach in front of their home.

But at 78, Beattie knows the time has come.

Time for someone else to take over Restless.

She’s been a constant and a comfort to him for nearly 60 years: his home, his refuge, his pathway to adventure, instigator of the best memories and friendships.

But increasingly, when he’s hauled Restless out for maintenance, Beattie has been confronted with the work needed.

“I feel at the end of my time with her now.

“It’s sad in a way. I don’t know quite how to explain it. It’s just a natural thing that’s come upon me - time has caught up with me.

“I’ve spent all these years with the boat and had a wonderful time, but I don’t feel I want to cling on to her.”

What Beattie wants is for history to repeat itself.

“I’d like to pass her on to a young person who would enjoy her as I have.

“I think of Maurice Relph, giving us the opportunity to buy the boat from him. And I’d like to do the same for somebody else that might be interested.”

Somebody excited to see what’s over the horizon. Somebody who mightn’t have the money to match the price Restless is listed at, for $25,000 on TradeMe, but would look after her.

Perhaps the biggest sadness for Beattie when Restless eventually sails away, will be opening his curtains each morning, and his yacht not being there, telling him which way the wind is blowing.

“The empty space. Just a mooring buoy bobbing around.”

But any regrets will be short-lived, and salved by knowing that after 105 years, Restless is still providing joy and adventure for whoever is at her helm, Beattie says.

“Absolutely. That’s my fervent wish.”

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