Shipyard Volharding Stavoren

As his name suggests (werf is Dutch for yard), Auke van der Werff came from a family of shipbuilders. In fact the van der Werff family had been constructing boats in the province of Friesland since 1729; initially near the town of Drachten, later further afield. Auke was born in 1892 in the village of Warga, where his father ran a shipyard. He bought the Stavoren yawl yard in 1918 and renamed it Volharding Stavoren (volharding is Dutch for perseverance).  It was to prove a prescient name. Auke’s first action was to add an electric side-launching slipway - a modern innovation at the time that allowed the yard to work with sizeable boats. Within ten years it had gained national renown for the construction of iron inland vessels, barges, luxury motorboats and ‘spitses’.   

Like many other ventures, the economic crisis of the 1930s hit the Volharding yard hard. Except for the occasional inland vessel, the demand for new ships dried up and all that remained was some repair work. Worse was to come as the Second World War broke out and Holland was occupied. Auke refused to work for the Germans and his yard barely scraped through the war years. By the time of the liberation in 1945, the Volharding yard was quiet and abandoned. 

The times had changed and the tenacious Auke had to basically start all over again. Inland shipping companies now used larger vessels that no longer fitted through the Stavoren lock, instead using the lock near Lemmer.

Despite his best efforts, Auke could not turn the fortunes of the yard round and in 1956 gave the helm to his youngest son Anton. The new yard master decided to modernise and tap into new markets. In the 1960s he built a large construction hall behind the house and added a substantial crane to the slipway.

Anton also started designing motor cruisers and iron Stavoren yawls to attract a new breed of recreational sailing client. Ten years later he successfully transformed his design for a fishing cutter into a cutter yacht for recreational use. These ‘Stavoren cutters’ became extremely popular among water sports enthusiasts in the 1970s.
 
In addition to building cutter yachts, larger cutters and coastal fishing trawlers, the Volharding yard also carried out new builds and repairs for the shipping industry. In the 1980s chartering became big business and many owners came to the Volharding yard to restore their vessels to their former glory for the enjoyment of paying guests.