Southlanders, Harold and Alan Melhop were the first people to navigate the Kawarau River in a jet boat and went on to develop the thrill-seeking, white-knuckle 32-kilometre ride up and down the Kawarau, Arrow and Shotover rivers. The inaugural boat trip was an adventure, to say the least. As the brothers made their first attempt to get the jet boat under the Kawerau Bridge it almost ended in disaster. On that attempt, they had to make a split-second decision to select which gate they would go through. As it turned out the one that they chose had an unexpected vertical drop resulting in the jet performing a nosedive with near catastrophic consequences. With their brief submarining experience, they were understandably shaken up by the thoughts of what might have been for the pair of them. Fortunately, they survived to revel in retelling the excitement of their pioneering adventure which made people line up to pay 5 shillings for a ride.
In January 1962 they began operating the Kawarau Jet Service from the wharf they built at Frankton. With more and more people wanting rides, Queenstown District Council invited the operation to be moved into the town’s Queenstown Pier for greater visitor awareness. Consequently, the Melhops shifted their operation into town and built a steel cantilevered pier to become the new Kawarau Jet terminal. Things changed when a wealthy group of American tourists insisted they would pay twenty-five pounds per head, five times the regular price if they were taken up the Shotover River in the boat. Thirty years later in 1993 Shotover Jet had become a world-famous attraction and had entertained 77,000 passengers, turning over $7 million.
With land already secured, the desire to build a Christian Camp at Queenstown for the youth of Southland and Otago remained before them so in 1966, the Melhops sold the Kawarau and Shotover businesses for £3,000. This boosted the camp finances by paying off the mortgages and with the pound-for-pound scheme still available, built the first dormitory and main hall.
In 1994, when asked if it was a difficult decision to sell the Shotover Jet Service, Alan Melhop replied, ‘Looking at the current state of Shotover Jet, if money was the only objective we’d feel sick, but our main interest was the camp…people matter more than things. We’ve seen over 200,000 young people benefit from the camp over 30 years.’
