Kohimarama Yacht Club took home the Evocean Sustainability Award at the 2025 Yachting New Zealand Excellence Awards, recognised for a project that has quietly rewritten the rulebook on how a sailing club can think about its environmental footprint. The Marama Project, as the initiative is known, converted the club's ageing 23-foot committee boat into New Zealand's first fully electric club committee boat, a milestone that has drawn attention well beyond the shores of Kohimarama.
The vessel at the heart of the project is no ordinary club runabout. Central to junior and youth sailing at the club since 1978, it carried decades of regattas in its hull before volunteers decided the time had come not to retire it, but to transform it. Over nearly two years, KYC volunteers worked alongside youth sailors and local marine specialists to restore and repower the historic boat. The original diesel engine, which had done faithful service for close to five decades, was removed and replaced with a modern 10kW electric motor.
What lifts the conversion beyond a simple engine swap is the off-grid capability the team built into the design. Solar panels were integrated specifically to power the motor independently, cutting the vessel's reliance on fossil fuels entirely and bringing operating costs and emissions down significantly. The result is a boat that goes about its race management duties in near silence, something race officials and competitors have both found to be a genuine improvement on the diesel-powered predecessor.
The project drew on real industry support to get there. Ecotricity NZ and Southern Spars were among the partners who contributed technical expertise and materials, giving the community-led effort a level of professional polish that strengthened its final outcome.
The Marama Project has since taken on a life beyond the technical achievement itself. It now functions as a working educational demonstration of how dated diesel support vessels can be modernised in a way that is both practical and environmentally sound, offering a replicable model for yacht clubs around the country that are weighing up how to reduce their carbon footprint. The combination of volunteer commitment, creative problem-solving and well-chosen industry partnerships produced something that speaks directly to what grassroots organisations can achieve when they approach the challenge seriously.
The Evocean Sustainability Award is presented to initiatives that set the pace in environmental stewardship and sustainable practice within the sport. KYC's win reflects a forward-looking philosophy toward club operations and makes a compelling case that the path to a cleaner marine environment runs, at least in part, through the decisions made by community sailing clubs. The Marama Project now stands as a flagship example of what becomes possible when a club backs sustainable innovation with genuine collective effort.
