When I was in Queenstown I met Dan from ‘DKT Edits’ and Hamish from ‘Huss Clothing’. Hamish had a wake board winch and knew of my background so hurled Dan and I along for a lot of epic winch missions. We were in Queenstown for 6 months and made the most of that heavy, steel box, going out every weekend for a winch mission. We racked up a lot of hours of winching during that 6 months.
Wake boarding isn’t accessible for everyone in New Zealand. You either need a boat (expensive), a cable park (not yet one in NZ, only 2.0s) or the initiative to build your own winch (unless you want to fork our 1000’s to buy one). The only thing we had available was the initiative to build our own winch. Fortunately for Dan and I my dad had a lot of the resources and we just needed to get the motor and the rope.
Dan, dad and myself built about 3 prototype winches before we got to the final product and it still isn’t 100% perfect. We are always adding things, cutting things, wielding things. It’s a never ending project and a fun one at that.
It took about 4 months before the winch was up and running perfectly. We did a lot of tests runs at easy accessible beaches before we took it out on any hefty journeys. We can now happily say, we are the only people to ever wake board in a lot of the locations we have been to.
It’s amazing when you’re driving along in your car and you’ll see a slight bit of water and stretch over to see if it would be a sick winching location, small ponds, shallow streams or open lakes, you never know what it could produce.
We have winched 100’s of locations both in the North Island and in the South Island and it’s not stopping here. We are currently planning a rad NZ wide winch tour starting in Auckland and ending in Queenstown. Keep posted for photos and videos of our NZ Wide Winch Tour dropping Feb 2016.
For now, here are a whole lot of epic pictures that will make you want to get out there and winch (and of course in case you don’t know what a winch is..).
FOR MORE GO TO: DKTEdits.com, DKT Edits on YouTube or www.husslife.com.
Words by: Sophie Schollum.
Photos: Daniel Thomas, Hamish Bourke, Ashleigh Mathews, Sophie Schollum.
