A Waiheke Island boat builder who knows the owner of a boat which was gutted by fire on Monday night says it could be suspicious.
Police are investigating the fire on Waiheke Island, in which one man died and another was in Middlemore Hospital with serious burns.
Retired boat builder Bernard Rhodes said many people were living at the Ostend mudflats, on Waiheke, as a solution to high housing prices and while they were struggling with life, they helped each other out.
Mr Rhodes said when the boat owner's old boat burned down three months ago, his friends rallied around to buy him a new vessel.
But drunkenness was a problem among a few of the boatowners, he said.
"It's tough living on the boat down there, they're a variety of people really, for many of them it's a solution to the housing crisis, rents are sky-high on Waiheke, as they are in Auckland, and living on a boat is just a cheap way of surviving basically."
