Austyn Holbrow Boat Project

Hi! My 16 year old son Austyn recently purchased an outboard via Facebook Marketplace for a boat he is working hard on restoring - a fantastic project for a young fulla!

Sadly after making a bank deposit payment of $1150 the seller (who had said he would organise delivery with Mainfreight from Rotorua to us in Warkworth) was not forthcoming with delivery details, track and trace etc, would not call us and stopped acknowledging and responding to messages. Austyn works part time and this is a months wages for him! The boat he is restoring is a 16ft Sea Nymph and I will try add some photos to this of the work in progress so far. He is currently sanding it back.

We have been overwhelmed by the support, advice, kindness and generosity on the NZ Fishing Community page! What an incredible community! Our intention was only to warn others of him but I was absolutely flooded by PMs encouraging me to set up a page for him. Although initially reluctant many of you have pointed out to me that this is a way to embrace the power of social media and accept help from many of you wanting to make an incredibly generous contribution towards turning this into a positive outcome for him. We know for everyone bad egg in this world there are thousands of good ones but this support has blown us away.

We are working with the Police to catch him but have been warned often the outcome doesn’t result in receiving the money back but should anything be recovered Austyn will of course pay it forward again, we will keep the community updated on that outcome.

THANK-YOU all so so much! You’re all amazing!

Cheers,

Carol