18/05/2026
Stewart Island has many great boats.
The Kapala stopped me every time. An old rust bucket. Battered by decades of southern swells. Weathered by every storm the Tasman could throw at her. And absolutely, breathtakingly beautiful.
She is moored right now in a place my family loves. A place we return to again and again. And every single time, I look over at her and I just... stop.
That's what weathering does. It doesn't diminish you. It reveals you.
Now she lives on the canvas β ready to be purchased and adored all over the globe.
My clothing brand EASTERLY and Rakiura Art Gallery are launching in June. Sign up to get the first look: www.easterly.kiwi or www.rakiuraartgallery.com β both will lead you to the same place.
THE EASTERLY RUN
The Story of the M.V. Kapala
Some hulls carry fish.
Others carry history.
Launched into the cold swells of the Tasman Sea in 1970, the 25-metre iron trawler Kapala spent her first three decades as a pioneering deep-water research vessel.
Charging into the pitch-black abyss of the continental shelf, her crews mapped underwater mountains and dragged the deep ocean floor β pulling up creatures entirely unknown to science.
Her legacy grew so vast that an entire genus of marine life was named in her honour. Thousands of her specimens are permanently preserved today inside the glass research jars of the Australian Museum.
A ship like that doesn't retire quietly.
The Mariner
Crossing the Tasman to the wild southern waters of New Zealand, the Kapala found her people.
Down in the punishing swells of the far south, she crossed paths with Joe Cave β a seasoned commercial fisherman whose life on the water read like an adventure novel.
Joe didn't just navigate the coast. He contributed directly to the world's understanding of it.
Working the deep southern shelf, Joe routinely saved rare benthic marine specimens from his traps, donating them to Te Papa Tongarewa β The Museum of New Zealand.
His contribution was so legendary that in 1995, when scientists discovered a completely new and incredibly rare species of spiny rock lobster β living in total darkness on a single isolated underwater volcano, 150 metres beneath the Pacific β they officially named it Jasus caveorum.
A permanent tribute to Joe Cave. Written into science forever.
Joe sold the Kapala to her next keeper for a princely sum of $1.
The Keeper of the Ghost
That keeper was Glen Perham.
Bringing the rugged ex-research vessel unannounced into Oamaru Harbour, Glen became the ultimate guardian of her modern ghost.
For 15 months, he championed the massive 25-metre hull against regulatory standstills and coastal storms β fighting to secure a permanent home for the largest, most historical silhouette on the eastern horizon.
Joe & Glen are everything EASTERLY stands for.
Adventure. Resilience. Grit. The elements.
But more than that β good men with great minds.
The kind of men who look at the deep and want to understand it.
That's EASTERLY. Island steady. World ready. π
Just breathe.
