From humble origins to lofty success: Jim Davern

Above: Members Simon and Kate Croft. Right: Pests and assorted vermin, beware, you are being watched. Kate and Simon install a Celium Hub on Rakino.

Helping with hi-tech pest control

Story by Debra Douglas Seeking to make the perfect mousetrap led Squadron member Simon Croft to leave his day job as a civil engineer to establish the company, Encounter Solutions.

Encounter Solutions enables government agencies, councils, landowners, rural businesses and non-profit organisations to optimise the way they manage and monitor devices and sensors, by installing Celium, cost-effective low power wireless networks and applications across rural and remote landscapes.

Simon explains: “Celium consists of an array of communication devices, called Nodes, which are equipped with sensors. The sensors are designed to monitor parameters such as the status of a pest control trap, which the Nodes then communicate to a base station called a Hub.

“Celium Hubs then transmit the data via satellite, or a cellular network, to secure cloud servers. After processing, the data is delivered to users via the Celium Web Portal, email notifications and mobile applications running on devices such as smartphones and tablets.”

Five years of dabbling took place in Simon’s basement before, drawing on his engineering background and encouraged by the goal of delivering long-term biodiversity outcomes, he started fulltime in 2015 promoting the Celium networks for smart pest control.

Simon: “The actual technology was developed by people who knew what they were doing, but I toiled away on the mouse traps and the company evolved from there.” As well as pest control, Encounter Solutions also works in the areas of wildlife monitoring, climate/ agriculture instrumentation, metering, security systems and infrastructure monitoring in New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific.

Simon’s wife, Kate, provides the logistics and client support at the company. This also makes use of her boat-driving skills. As a member of the RNZYS Race Management Team, she has an exemplary qualification as the club’s recently-named ‘Boat Driver of the Year’.

“I am the first woman to receive that title,” said Kate. “I guess the criteria being that I had not ever collided with another boat! “

The bulk of Outlook Solution’s work is in the biosecurity and conservation space and locally the company is concentrating on projects in the Hauraki Gulf, especially on Rakino, Browns Island and Waiheke.

Kate: “With agreement from former Sailing Director, Laurie Jury, I have been able to borrow the Squadron’s patrol boat Tiri, to take Simon and our team to the islands for reconnaissance work. We, of course, pay for the fuel. We are very grateful for the support from the Squadron.”

Both Kate and Simon have sailing backgrounds. Although Kate was brought up on a Waikato dairy farm, she sailed lasers at Mt Maunganui at the weekends.

That led onto sailing with friends on the classic yacht Rawhiti. Then in

2000, skipper Bruce Dunlop invited her to be second mate on the schooner Arcturus.

Simon was introduced to ‘proper’ sailing when he worked with John Duder, who needed crew for his classic yacht Spray. Simon: “That’s how I met Kate. We were usually last in the B division and she was on Rawhiti, up there taking line honours.”

In 2003 Kate and Simon sailed to Tonga on the 45ft steel boat Compass Rose and then hitched a ride on a Cal 36 to Fiji. The Cal 36 had been described as a stout comfortable cruiser, but Simon says the trip was a bit eventful as the boat had come down from Mexico, where its wiring had been done by sound musicians.

The couple survived the journey and joined the schooner Astor to cruise Vanuatu waters before heading to Bundaberg, Queensland. Delivery trips to Bali and Malaysia followed, before the pair spent eight months in the Med working on superyachts.

“We came home in 2004,” said Simon. “I was keen to get back to my work. It was getting a bit boring – there seemed to be a lot of just floating around, cleaning boats every day.”

Kate, who had done her commercial time with relief skipper work on the classic schooners Arcturus and Haparanda, managed a Squadron Course Marshal team at the 2021 America’s Cup.

“Just after the Cup, the Squadron put out a call for volunteers. My course marshal crew sponsored Simon and I to be members of the club, which was very kind of them and, through that, I came to be a Race Management volunteer.

“I wanted to keep up the boat handling skills I had acquired during the Cup, because up until then everything had been pretty much under sail.

“I enjoy the company of the different ones I work with. Everyone in the team has been very supportive. ‘I’m learning new things, there’s plenty of camaraderie and they are all characters. Everyone has a story.”

• For information re being a part of the volunteer race management team, contact Sailing Manager Reuben Corbett, RCorbett@rnzys.org.nz, or Race Manager Megan Thomson mthomson@rnzys.org.nz.

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The remains of Jim Davern’s childhood tin canoe take pride of place in the garden of his waterfront home.

From humble origins to lofty success

In a corner of a multi-million dollar waterfront property at Milford Beach is a rusty concoction of scrap metal, which might be mistaken for an ironic artwork by some avant garde sculptor. It is, in fact, more important than that: it is an iconic piece of New Zealand’s yachting heritage.

This is the remains of a tin canoe assembled from bits of scrap scavenged from a building site some 83 years ago by a nine-year-old tearaway kid from Pt Chevalier called Jim Davern. It marks the start of a lifelong passion for the sea and boats, which saw Davern play a pivotal role in launching New Zealand sailing’s climb to global stardom.

Young Davern launched his tin canoe in the Meola Creek and set off down the Waitemata Harbour. HMS Achilles was berthed at Devonport following its engagement in the Battle of the River Plate. Auckland had welcomed the ship with a massive parade down Queen Street and spirits were high. Davern was determined to see what the fuss was about.

With the wind and tide behind him, he voyaged down to Devonport and carried out a close inspection of the warship. “I remember one of the crew leaning over the rail and yelling at me not to come so close,” Davern recalls with a laugh. “It was as if he was worried my little canoe was going to put a dent in his ship.”

Getting back to Pt Chev against the wind and outgoing tide proved more of a challenge and Davern finally staggered home in the dark “to a mum who was hysterical”.

Building sites and boats were to become the defining features of a life of adventure, risktaking and success that would mark Davern’s action-packed history. Now aged 92, he is not as agile as he once was, but his famous wit is as mischievous and sharp as ever.

The garage of his stunning Milford Beach home is a shrine to his sailing history, with trophies, racing pennants and photoboards attesting to his many achievements. In pride of place is the line honours trophy he secured with Fidelis in the 1966 Sydney-Hobart classic. That victory, along with Chris Bouzaid’s One Ton Cup triumph with Rainbow II in Heligoland three years later, set New Zealand sailing on its path to international success.

The archetypal Kiwi battler, Davern came from humble beginnings. He was brought up by his solo mother. “I never knew my father. I grew up on the streets of Pt Chev. I was a paper boy, a butcher’s boy. I did all kinds of things.”

But boats were his passion. Following the tin canoe episode, young Davern managed to exhume an abandoned P-Class dinghy from a muddy grave. He tidied it up enough to go racing and later graduated to Z-Class and Idle

Along dinghies. At one national championship, he came second to Peter Mander, who went on to glory as New Zealand’s first sailing gold medallist at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne.

After he left school Davern wanted to be a boatbuilder, but his mother insisted he should do a building apprenticeship instead. His big break came during the construction of Auckland’s Southern Motorway. The Ministry of Works bought up hundreds of houses to clear the route, but had no real idea what to do with them.

Seeing an opportunity, Davern offered to remove the houses. With borrowed money he bought an ex-army V8 truck, had a large steerable trailer built and set about removing some 500 houses, which he relocated to sections he purchased all over Auckland. He sold off some to generate cashflow, but retained a significant number as rental properties to establish a lucrative property portfolio.

“People asked me where all those houses came from. I told them I got them off the back of a truck,” he chuckles.

Following the motorway success, his company went on to relocate about 5,000 houses and even bigger structures, like the old members’ stand at Eden Park. His newspaper advertisements had a cheeky slogan: “If you don’t like your neighbours, I’ll move your house!”

Throughout his business life, Davern’s sailing passion was not neglected. When John Lidgard started building a new 34ft Bob Stewart design, Davern was not immediately impressed. “I thought it looked quite strange, like a launch.”

However, when he saw its performance on the water, he was mighty impressed and persuaded two of his friends, Boyd Hargrave

Above: Jim Davern at the start of his property career. Below: The Sydney-Hobart trophy is the cream of an extensive crop of Davern’s sailing prizes.