For more than 150 years, C Blunt Boat Builders, of Williamstown and Geelong, has been launching classic wooden boats into the waters of Port Phillip Bay. From sea-faring vessels carrying missionaries to the New Hebrides to Classic race winning wooden yachts.

Now a listed heritage site run by a fifth generation of the Blunt family, it provides  a unique link to Victoria's maritime past. The following extract from a letter sent by the founder Clement Blunt epitomises the Blunt's will to survive and succeed 

LOSING your home and possessions to a bush fire would be enough to send all but the hardiest of new immigrants scurrying back to their homeland. Yet, when such a disaster struck English newlyweds Clement and Sarah Blunt shortly after their arrival in Australia in the early 1850s, they entertained no such thought. Back then, the outpost of Lorne was no place for the fainthearted. Settled by only a handful of men seeking fortune sending valuable timbers along the coast to Geelong and the colony of Port Phillip, it was frequented only by aborigines, sealers, whalers and adventurers.
Clement Blunt, a boat builder by trade, must have belonged to the latter, taking a wife barely in her 20s to live on the beautiful, yet wild coastline, 140 km Southwest of today's Melbourne, where he sought to eke out a living building a boat for one of the squatters. 

Having left the relative comforts of Cambridge, England, for the bush, the fire that ravaged their home was not to deter him. Undaunted, they walked with what little survived the blaze to Geelong, a journey which in those days followed a treacherous route through virgin forests.

There, on June 9, 1858, the 34-year-old began a boat building dynasty that survives to this day with the above tender for a pair of centre board whale boats.

As in Lorne, the couple did not linger in Geelong. Within two years of establishing his business, they took their three young children to Melbourne at the height of the Gold Rush boom where Clement built the first hire boats on the Yarra River. But here, the forces of nature proved to be against him again - as they would subsequent generations of Blunts - when, in 1865, the yard he had established to the east of the Princes Bridge was flooded. With three more children in tow, he returned with Sarah to Geelong after a brief stop in Sandridge, now Port Melbourne.

After several unsuccessful attempts at obtaining permission to operate a pleasure cruiser on the Barwon River, Clement's attention was refocused on building boats and distilling his talent into the five sons who followed him into the family business. Within two months of opening his yard, it became home to the Geelong Rowing Club. And, according to the city's newspapers, his designs began turning heads. 

One report of May 1, 1874, said a 24-foot yawl built for a local doctor "skims over the water like a thing of life".

Given the survival of Blunt's through five generations and numerous calamities, it is likely his sons inherited other talents: unwavering self belief and stubbornness.
A death notice posted shortly after he passed away aged 75 praised his "superior" workmanship and popularity with "all classes of yachting men, few of whom ever put in a day at Geelong without whiling away half an hour 'yarning' to the old man". However, it also stated:

"He took unkindly to the modern shaped bow and long overhanging counter, and many's the fight an intending owner ... had with him before he consented to fall in with the new fangled notions."

"On Monday evening a yacht made to the order of Mr Findley was launched from Mr Blunt's boat building establishment in the presence of a number of members of the Hobson's Bay Yacht Club.The boat is considered one of the finest... turned out from local sheds...The health of the builder was also drunk. Mr Findley and Mr Blunt suitably responded."
The Advertiser, Williamstown, June 9, 1888.