6 | Sea Turner REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT Dinghy lift making waves Nicole and James Turner’, their innovative new dinghy lift is making waves around the world. T T Russell Fredric The brainchild of Auckland couple Nicole and James Turner, Sea Turner, an innovative new dinghy lift that operates from a boat or car roof, is making waves around the world. The couple had discovered a problem, and in classic Kiwi fashion, went about creating a solution when they could not find any other suitable option. A revolutionary way to load and store dinghies on boats and vehicles, based on a pair of easily installed folding davit arms, as far as James and Nicole know, Sea Turner is a world-first. With the push of a button on a remote, a dinghy is lifted and loaded on four points and deployed in less than a minute. When secured, Sea Turner keeps a dinghy compactly stowed upside down and out of the way, while preventing water and debris collecting, and it can usually be installed without significant reinforcement or modification, needing just eight bolts to secure it. James and Nicole launched their company in 2023 after they bought their dream nine-metre boat, but found that the outboard motors meant storing a dinghy for getting their two young children ashore was a struggle. After trials storing it on the bow and roof that was awkward for one person to do, they settled on an inflatable dinghy that lived on the back deck and inflated as needed, but this added 30 minutes to every trip ashore. After failing to find a ready-made product, James started coming up with ideas of how he would solve the problem, and sketched out a set of arms that would lift the boat up and turn it upside down to store it on the roof. While this sounds simple, prototyping, manufacturing, and marketing a product from scratch has been a huge challenge, Nicole says. James worked in IT, and is a commercially qualified skipper with 20 years of maritime search and rescue experience, so he knows well the challenges of working in a maritime environment, and the need to create a product that could stand up under harsh conditions. Nicole had a background in event management, but neither she nor James had any engineering experience, so they initially approached a patent attorney, who introduced them to an engineer. “Now we’re into the selling and marketing stage. In March of this year we launched for production,” Nicole says. Sea Turner is a finalist in the 2025 Auckland Business Awards North and West Excellence in Innovation category. Sea Turner’s largest social media presence is on Instagram, and in recent months the system gained a viral global boost when it featured on Supercar Blondie’s Instagram channel, which has 18 million followers. “We’re massively pleased and so grateful for the exposure. We’ve had over eight million views on that; that’s generated a lot of enquiries, basically we’re getting enquiries from all over the world,” says Nicole. Consequently, in addition to engaging New Zealand distributors, Sea Tuner has been establishing distributor agreements in Australia and Canada with the expectation of more countries to follow. The first export unit was shipped to Australia in October. Weighing 50 kilograms, Sea Turner can lift a 40kg boat and is fabricated locally by Phoenix Engineering. It has been a real head-turner at boat shows or anywhere it has been demonstrated. “It’s such a showstopper,” says Nicole. “A crowd gathers to watch it; it’s pretty cool. Seeing people’s reaction to it makes it all worth it.” Precision engineering services supported by the best technology. Proudly supporting Sea Turner 04 568 4442 www.myriadengineering.co.nz
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