When David Fethers left Boluda Towage Australia in early March attention was drawn to his quite remarkable curriculum vitae. Dale Crisp explored with David a career at sea, in the air and on land.
Good question. “What the heck?” is probably also what any HR manager or recruiter says when they first open my CV.
I’ve always liked operating machinery, and jobs where something real happens at the end of the day; a ship moved, a contract got signed, or an aeroplane landed where it was supposed to. I was also blessed with parents who constantly reminded us that we could be and do whatever we wanted to, so I probably grew up with a fairly weak understanding of sensible limits.
Driven might be the polite term.
I’ve always thought formal study is useful because it forces you to challenge your own assumptions. The older I get, the more I realise experience is valuable, but it can also make you confidently wrong. These days it’s also much easier to access really good post-graduate courses through online learning, so there are fewer excuses not to keep stretching yourself. I’ve kept studying partly out of interest, and partly to stop myself becoming one of those blokes who starts every sentence with, “Back in my day...”
Aircraft restoration and construction. At the moment that mostly means the restoration of a North American T-28D Trojan and the scratch-built construction of a MKIX Spitfire. The T-28 was found in a farmer’s shed in Gippsland and had previously seen service in Laos during the Korean conflict. It has real heritage value and combat history, and in my view, it deserves to be preserved. The Spitfire project is a very different challenge but equally rewarding from an engineering and fabrication perspective.
Yeah...there’s an old joke about how do you tell a pilot at a party? You don't, they’ll tell you. I've always tried to avoid being that guy.
Other lesser-known facts, I got my first taste of sea-going life on the Bounty replica during the bi-centenary celebrations, which spurred me to apply to every Australian shipping company for a cadetship. Luckily Howard Smith's had a very loose recruitment process at the time. I’ve built and flown my own helicopter, and I’m way more happy in a workshop with a lathe or rivet gun than I am in a corner office. I also have a forklift licence, which may be the qualification I’ve used least, although I’m quietly very proud of it.
Probably building a very strong business through a period of substantial industry change without losing sight of the fundamentals, safe operations, good people, and commercial discipline. Towage looks simple from the outside, but it’s a tough, capital-heavy, industrial business with no shortage of moving parts, and at times a full-on commercial knife fight.
I’m proud that we grew the business materially, improved performance, and built a team of talented people who genuinely care about each other and what they do. When I joined, Smit Lamnalco had just bought the PB Towage business in Australia for a little over $50 million. Ten years later the region was sold to Boluda for $640 million. That’s not a bad result. I’m proud to have led the team that helped build that value. I’m also proud that we proved you can be commercially hard-headed without becoming impossible to deal with, although I’m sure some people would contest that point.
Like most things, it depends. Foreign ownership in itself is not the issue. Good operators with access to capital, systems and global experience can be very good for the sector. The real question is whether they are prepared to understand local conditions, invest properly, and give enough authority to the people actually running the business on the ground.
Australia has a habit of being managed from a PowerPoint slide somewhere else. Towage is still a very local business, even when the shareholders are global. If overseas owners respect that, it can work very well. If they don’t, there is potentially a very expensive lesson to be learnt.
At sea, yes. In the air, absolutely. In management, only if you have a slightly masochistic personality and enjoy the responsibility without needing to get the credit.
A career at sea teaches resilience, judgement and humility very quickly. Aviation teaches discipline and systems thinking. Management can be rewarding, but it’s often sold as being more glamorous than it really is. Mostly it’s decision-making, people problems, and trying to maintain your sense of humour while everyone brings you their emergencies. So yes to all three, but go in with your eyes open.
I think space can wait. I don't really have the room at present to announce a Mars program from the shed.
More likely it’s some combination of consulting, aviation, and marine projects. I’ve never been very good at doing just one thing, so I suspect the next chapter will look much like the earlier ones, unconventional, mildly overcommitted, and still interesting enough to keep me focused.
This article appeared in the April | May 2026 edition of DCN Magazine