Phil Salthouse's passion is boats and boating. It is both his hobby and his work.
Phil grew up "messing around in boats" and he has a wealth of boating experience as a result. From a very young age he cruised the coastal waters of the North Island of New Zealand with his family in a variety of yachts and power boats. Starting as crew to well-known yachtsmen and going on to build and sail his own dinghies with success, he then progressed to keelboats where, both as crew and skipper/owner/ builder, he enjoyed success locally, nationally and internationally. The love of boating, shared by his wife Sandy, has been passed on to their four children.
Phil has spent his working life – 30 years – building, repairing, altering and project-managing yachts and motor-yachts for a range of local and international clients. He began as an apprentice at Salthouse Boatbuilders Limited, where he learnt his trade the hard way including spending the first six months sanding the topsides of a 70-foot yacht before moving on to boatbuilding in timber and glass along with high-quality interior joinery construction. This began a long "hands-on" career on many and varied boats – wooden dinghies to large composite sailing catamarans, performance cruising yachts to high-tech carbon race yachts, speed boats to large power cats.
After selling his interest in Salthouse Boatbuilders, Phil went into business for himself, initially project-managing a new build and a major refit as well as numerous smaller jobs, and finally setting up Aquamagic Yachts Limited, which has at times had up to 40 employees and subcontractors on site.
Aquamagic Yachts Limited have been busy recently with the project management of Emirates Team New Zealand’s race yacht built at Southern Spars. As ETNZ’s onsite representative at Southern Spars, our job was to ensure that drawings were delivered on time, the correct materials were used and recorded accurately so that the finished boat was class compliant, as well as incorporating all the custom details ETNZ wanted into the boat. Aquamagic Yachts also kept track of expenditure and schedule to ensure the boat was delivered to ETNZ on time and on budget.
We have also completed some local projects and managed the refit and navigation / communications package upgrade on Shahtoosh, the Warwick 75 which we completed in 2012. Shahtoosh has now completed 50,000nm in her first five years. This work was carried out in Langkawi, Malaysia. Aquamagic Yachts made two trips to the yacht and helped co-ordinate the various trades involved to ensure everything happened in the correct order. Following successful sea trials in Langkawi, Shahtoosh then made a non-stop, trouble-free voyage back to her home port of Hong Kong where she is ready to begin her next 50,000nm with her happy owner.
Phil's practical on-the-water boating experience, combined with skills acquired through a lifetime of building and repairing boats, places Aquamagic Yachts in an advantageous position to be able to offer good, practical, aesthetically pleasing, independent advice for a wide range of marine-related issues or to build the boat of your dreams.
