Reel Ambition

The unstoppable Bryce Dinneen from Wish4Fish proves there are no limits to sharing his adventurous dreams.

WORDS Sue Hoffart
PHOTOS Graeme Murray + Logan Davey + Supplied

Four percent. According to specialists, that’s the level of voluntary movement Bryce Dinneen has retained since his mobility was snatched by a single dumb, drunken dive into Wellington Harbour.

He jokes that, statistically speaking, he now has to work 25 times harder than other people just to keep up. 

In fact, the Pyes Pa resident has been outrunning the able-bodied for years, with his clear-headed vision, outstanding fundraising feats and extraordinary drive to share the joy of a salt water adventure.

Bryce formed a trust and launched the Wish4Fish charity a decade ago, to smash down the barriers that prevent some people from boating and fishing on the ocean. Under his watch, the trust has spent almost $90,000 taking more than 350 people onto the water regardless of their physical or mental disabilities, illness or financial needs. 

But he’s always had bigger fish to fry.

Hiring less-than-ideal vessels to take groups of two or three people at a time only proved to him that demand greatly exceeded capacity. So Bryce has driven an additional fundraising campaign that has raised $2.4 million. This venture, dubbed Project Noah, funded the design and construction of a remarkable custom-made boat that has opened seagoing doors for even more people who would otherwise be confined to land. First launched from Tauranga Bridge Marina recently, the world-first 18m vessel caters for 1000 people a year. 

Last year, he was named volunteer of the year in the TECT Trust community awards for being “a shining example to us all to never give up, and to strive to make the world a better place.”

And he has pulled all this off with 96 percent less mobility than most of the rest of us; a shoulder shrug on the left side, some movement in his right shoulder and bicep. It’s enough to manipulate the phone he keeps in his lap and operate his motorised wheelchair, not enough to scratch his nose. His ever-whirring brain works overtime, though, alongside an uncanny ability to articulate and quietly inspire. 

It’s been a team effort, of course. Bryce is adamant credit be given to all the family, friends, trustees, management team and generous business people, strangers, tradespeople and major funders who continue to work alongside him. However, there is no doubt whose audacious dream they’re following.

“Fishing’s part of it,” the charity founder says, explaining his determination to build a large, stable catamaran fitted with everything from hospital beds and a ceiling hoist to an accessible bathroom, shower, elevator and modified fishing rods. “But sometimes it’s not about the fish. It’s about the camaraderie, the highs and lows, losing a fish then trying again, channelling that frustration in the right way. It’s about getting out on the water, wind in the hair, sun on the face. It’s about normality.

“If you have an illness or a disability or a hardship, if your life’s frazzled, you can spend a day on the water and I guarantee you’ll come back with some kind of clarity.”

He describes seeing people with serious diagnoses – schizophrenia, bipolar, cancer, tetraplegic – leave their worries on land when they embark on a Wish4fish voyage. Accompanying caregivers, often overextended family members, are similarly uplifted. Some passengers have never been on a boat, others are keen fishers who imagined they would never venture on one again.

Bryce feared he was in the latter camp for much of his 11-month stay at Burwood Spinal Unit, following his life-altering accident. 

He tosses out more numbers from those difficult days in the Christchurch hospital. Like 8kg. That’s the weight that was initially attached to his head back in 2007, when he spent 23.5 hours a day in head traction to stabilise the fractures that had caused paralysis from the neck down. 

He was at a stag party in Wellington when it happened, an outgoing, carefree business student dressed in a suit and tie. Bryce and a dozen friends started the day with a champagne breakfast – “too much champagne, not enough breakfast” – and decided to leap into the harbour to sober up but he misjudged the depth of the water.

His neck was broken and his spinal cord so badly squashed, doctors likened it to the damage caused by an elephant standing on a tomato. 

Until then, he was a fishing-mad 29-year-old cheerfully on the verge of a new career. Having abandoned a building apprenticeship, he spent 10 years immersed in the “bright lights and late nights” of the hospitality industry before launching into an Otago University finance degree at age 28. He’s always been entrepreneurial and still can’t drive past a kid selling something on the roadside without making a purchase, even if he has to toss the bagged fruit or homemade lemonade away. In his teens, the former Tauranga Boys’ College prefect was a top cricketer who hoped to play for New Zealand. He also chaired the school’s charity committee, gathering skills he never imagined using from a wheelchair.

Suddenly, he faced the prospect of never walking, never feeding himself.

“Mum and Dad brought me up the right way, to open the door for a lady, to pull the chair out for her, to give someone else that seat on the bus. I want to kick a soccer or rugby ball around with my two nephews. Those options aren’t available any more.

“Now, I need someone to turn the light switch on in the morning and to turn it off again at night and everything in between.”

He describes one grim day of hopelessness in the early months and recalls how horribly upset this attitude made his parents and sister.

“I made a promise to myself. No more tears. Whatever happens moving forward, I’ll try and make the most out of it.

“Mum and Dad are really good people. They worked hard, they provided for me but they also taught me you have to work a little if you want to get a little.”

So he focussed on what he wanted, rather than what he couldn’t do. Like getting back on a boat and fishing again. Or using his voice to advocate for others, especially those with disabilities.

It was the photos stuck to the ceiling above his hospital bed that inspired him; images of happy times in the company of good people and plenty of fish. 

“I was like, ‘how am I going to do this again’,” Bryce remembers of his determination to return to the sport he has loved since dangling a line off a wharf at age four. “Speaking with people on the spinal unit, fellow patients, I’d ask ‘would you like to go fishing’. I used to hear ‘never’ a lot. And ‘can’t’. When you’re someone with a disability you hear ‘never’ and ‘can’t’.

“Those words are still there in my vocab, they just get flipped around. If you say negative, I say challenge.  You can change so many things. 

“There’s stuff I have to manage that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but I’m grateful. I just appreciate everything, waking up every morning. Every minute is just gold for me now. Me getting up in the morning, that’s gold. And if it’s not, well, sometimes you need a day in bed.”

He was still undergoing rehabilitation, living at home in Tauranga with his parents, when he established Wish4Fish. A local accountant and a lawyer helped establish the trust that would govern the charity, serving as unpaid trustees. Initially, they needed to raise money and profile amidst a sea of 27,000 other registered charitable New Zealand trusts, churning out funding applications and talking to people in the community. The team has expanded since then – Wish4Fish has a general manager – but Bryce has lost count of the number of fundraising sausage sizzles, dinners and corporate events he has personally attended. Or the talks given to service groups and interested companies.

Bryce fundraised $2.4m over 10 years to build FV Wish4Fish.

From the outset, it proved difficult to find a suitable, wheelchair-friendly boat for the charity trips. Charter boat skippers were nervous of tackling the necessary logistics and most vessels proved unsafe, too unstable, with difficult access and problematic layouts. Often, Bryce would test potential vessels himself to see what possible issues that others might face on board. He even submitted to the indignity of being hoisted out of his chair and lifted over the side of a boat when his wheelchair would not fit. 

“First, you’ve got to get onto the boat from the dock and you don’t want to be faced with stairs to access the bathroom. Then you have someone in a wheelchair, on a moving platform. Having a high level spinal cord injury, I can’t regulate my body temperature and you’re dealing with sea conditions and weather that can change at any time. If people are strapped into a chair and they go overboard, they’re going straight to the bottom so everyone wears an auto-inflating life jacket. There are a whole lot of health and safety issues.”

Boat owners tried to help. One commercial skipper offered to widen the back of his boat and built a ramp to get Bryce on board. Monohull boats were deemed too unsteady. Most were too small to take more than two or three high-needs people with their caregivers. A boat owned by a double-amputee in Coromandel proved better than most but every vessel required compromise.

“The only solution was to build a boat,” he says, comparing his ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy to Noah and his ark.

As the catamaran nears completion, he and the Project Noah team are focussed on the next stage. That means creating a sustainable non-profit organisation that can fund ongoing operational costs – paying a skipper, maintaining the boat, taking passengers at no charge - by hiring the boat to corporate, community and educational entities. 

Support continues to come from multiple quarters, like the occupational therapists working at local medical equipment firm Cubro. Or the companies that have seized on the cause and run their own fundraising events. Currently, he is in discussion with staff from Waikato University’s marine studies department, to find ways to work together.

He credits UNO magazine with significantly raising the charity’s profile when it published his story back in 2016. That led to an offer of help from a reader with project management and feasibility study skills, which in turn set Wish4Fish on the path to winning a game-changing $1.5m New Zealand Lottery grant.

In 2016, television personality Matt Watson showcased the charity and its founder on screen. When Tauranga retiree Ray Lowe saw the show, he stepped forward to design a fishing rod that allows Bryce to cast and wind in a fish independently, courtesy of electric reels and technological wizardry operated from an iPad in his lap. The inventive stainless steel specialist has gone on to build and donate more of these fishing rods to others and to help with other public accessibility projects. 

Bryce credits his friend with driving the Wish4Fish boat project forward, too.

“Ray’s a special kind of guy. He’s a lot more determined than me, with a 24-carat heart of gold. One day, he said ‘Bryce, if you want to build a boat let’s go draw it, map it out. So we went on an asphalt area and just mapped it out with chalk. Then we came back and measured it out. It was me and a guy and some chalk in a carpark. 

“He was the one who said we need to make the wheelchair or disability king or queen on that boat, make sure all the sharp edges are smooth. Add extra beds for the support people who stay overnight. It needs to be truly accessible to all.”

Bryce pauses and smiles, staring into the distance.

“Imagine if the family of someone with terminal cancer has the ability to go out to Mayor Island on that boat and see the sunrise at Southeast Bay before their life gets really tricky.”

Once the catamaran is in the water, he plans to step back from the “boat of joy” project that has consumed much of his energy in the last decade. It’s not his boat, he insists. It belongs to New Zealand. 

After the launch, he will spend more time with his beloved family in Christchurch, seek employment, fish, watch some cricket and relish seeing friends without tapping them on the shoulder to buy tickets to a fundraising event. That said, he can’t help imagining the changes he might be able to make for disabled people who have to negotiate airline travel.

In the meantime, there is more grassroots work to do for the man who conjured a multi-million dollar dream then made it come true. Tomorrow, he has people to meet and sizzling sausages to sell at a corporate fishing competition.