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The only home ever built on Mou Waho belonged to a Devon shipwright who turned an island of matai and totara into a boatyard.
Alfred Herman Pinn, a native of Devon, England, served his apprenticeship in shipbuilding at Plymouth Dockyards before the lure of gold pulled him to the other side of the world — first to Victoria, Australia, then on to New Zealand. He sailed for New Zealand in 1862 aboard the French barque St Jane, a voyage remembered for a scurvy and fever outbreak that struck down the master and most of the crew. Pinn, a man of many talents, took charge of navigation himself and brought the ship safely to port.
He lost his own miner's right in the Makarora River — while pulling another man out of it.
Pinn held one of the first miner's rights ever issued in Victoria, and carried it in his pocketbook for years — until he lost it in the Makarora River while rescuing a merchant who had gotten out of his depth fording the river with a bag of gold on his back. Rather than chase gold himself, Pinn saw a better opportunity in supplying the goldfields: a highcountry region largely without trees was about to need enormous amounts of timber for homes, hotels, and mining equipment. Mou Waho, with its stands of matai and other native hardwood, was exactly the resource he needed, and in 1863 he set up there for good.
Pinn's cottage near today's main landing was, by all accounts, a comfortable one — complete with a garden growing currants, gooseberries and raspberries, and 200 merino sheep stocked on the island alongside it. It remains the only home ever built on Mou Waho. Remnants of the stone wharf and the cottage's foundations can still be found among the trees today, along with the odd surviving fruit bush from Pinn's garden, quietly persisting more than 160 years later.
Pinn built several schooners right on Mou Waho using the island's own timber — the Nun, the Eureka, and the Isabella among them — which spent years carrying freight and early tourists around Lake Wanaka. The Nun sank in the summer of 1877–78 while loaded with a steam engine bound for a mill, but was refloated, repaired, and relaunched under a new name: the Saucy Kate, which went on giving good service on the lake for years afterward. Today, the wharf and boatbuilding site are an easy stop on the walk around the island — a genuine piece of 1860s lake history hiding quietly in the bush.
See where he built his boats on our full-day lake tour, which stops at Mou Waho.
