If there’s a job needing done in Bluff then ‘Flutes’ is your man.

Third generation Bluff royalty as the grandson of the renowned Fred and Myrtle Flutey, famous the nation over for their iconic Bluff ‘Paua House’, Flutes pours out practical kindness wherever he goes.

From organising mass pallet drop-offs to his workplace at Southfish, cutting them up for firewood or recycling them, also repurposing reject fish blocks for crayfishermen, all to fund the Awarua Boating Club, Flutes has had it sussed.

He’s your ultimate DIY innovator, turning a rubber bobbin off a fishing boat and an old fishing net into a netball hoop for the local kids.

Flutes has been one of Southland’s best rowers in his day, sporting a haul of World Masters and Australian Masters golds between 2004 and 2014.

He took out New Zealand titles as a youngster cleaning up the lightweight doubles at the national champs with fellow Bluff rower Rex Ryan.

Kevin (rear) and his faithful rowing buddy, Rex Ryan, pumping out the wins as Southland champions about 20 years ago. Photo: Supplied

He also rowed for the NZ Lightweight Colts from 1979, based in Christchurch for two seasons. Eileen Keys and her husband billeted him.

“She was like my second Mum.”

The other rowers at Karapiro meets called him ‘Penguin’ because he rowed in Bluff.

Flutes may have gone on to even greater things, but oystering is in the Flutey blood so when good mate Willie Calder came to Christchurch and said, ‘Come home and come oystering for me’, Flutes says he couldn’t resist.

“I just love it, and you can’t take the Bluff out of the boy,” he grins.

‘The Bluff’ represented a wonderfully, happy childhood roaming the outdoors, the eldest of four kids, racing homemade trollies down steep Bluff streets, making flax darts for street competitions, bows and arrows from lupins and toi toi weapons with nails in the tip. No OSH concerns in the 1960s.

Kevin (left) and the kids with Grandad Fred and his dad Ian. Photo: Supplied

“Mum would call us for tea and we’d be straight back outside again, kicking rugby balls over the power lines to the neighbours’ disgust,” he chuckles.

“We even built an underground wartime tunnel from the henhouse to Dad’s workshop with old timber and a tin roof which we camouflaged with grass clumps and Mum and Dad couldn’t find us.”

Flutes has had a few close calls, like the time his hand slipped off an oyster boat rail, eight-year-old Kevin plummeting into the ocean off the wharf, gumboots and all.

“Thankfully, my cousin heard the splash, and Keith Templeton threw a rope to me, which luckily hit me on the hand.”

At three he got into his dad’s shed and drank fresh paint, rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped.

“They thought they’d lost me.”

Kevin, 28, shows how it’s done in the children’s playground in Queens Park, Invercargill. Photo: Supplied

Much tastier was Nana Myrtle’s baking, her Drop Sponge a winner.

Flutes was bound to become adventurous.

Grandad Fred would get dropped off by the Wairua Stewart Island ferry at Chalky Inlet on its way to service the Puysegur Lighthouse.

He’d live in a cave for two weeks while collecting washed up paua shells.

“That was his holiday. He’d walk along the shore up towards The Five Fingers leaving the big bags of shells then collecting them in his 16-foot (4.8m) dinghy,” Flutes says.

“One day he got stuck due to weather so he pushed that huge dinghy through the bush into Preservation Inlet where he could meet the Wairua.”

Famous Grandad Fred Flutey polishing his beloved paua shells. Photo: Supplied

Dad Ian also rowed in the 1950s and once a very slight Flutes had got a taste as coxswain, aged nine, he helped take the local team to stardom for seven years until he was old enough to take a seat.

“We had some ding dong battles rowing against Invercargill’s Eade brothers and the Riverton club,” he recalls. The Awarua Club was humming then with 72 rowers and seven coxswains.

A 21-year-old Flutes was right there amongst it helping fundraise and build the new club building in 1981.

Photo: Supplied

He was also a volunteer as camera boat driver for the World Rowing Championships in 2010 at Karapiro and served on the Southland Rowing Association executive for eight years, representing the province nationally.

A man who likes to get the job done, not even Flutes could turn down the offer to row his first Masters in Hamburg, Germany, in 2004.

“I’d just pulled our kitchen sink out to start a $20,000 renovation for my wife when Rex Ryan knocked on the door.”

Another rower had fallen ill, and Flutes was needed to compete, his boss at Southport urgently helping raise the airfares.

Fortunately, wife Debbie was a good sport about it encouraging him to go.

“I’m halfway through that kitchen now,” he grins.

Kevin (centre) in action in the Intermediate 8 in 1994. Photo: Supplied

He’d be finished but Flutes is too busy volunteering his time to help others, something Debbie and his family have been fully supportive of.

“It’s just who I am,” he says.

With rowing numbers dwindling in Bluff, for the last eight years Flutes has coached young Invercargill high school rowers.

“It was supposed to be for two days a week but that’s turned into seven,” he grins.

The competition’s still in him though. “I tore my hamstring in four places trying to beat the school rowing girls at our May Ten Pin Bowling break-up.”

Flutes has been at the helm of his dad’s 72-foot steel oyster boat from a young age, even helping out back then.

Four generations of Fluteys, from left, Grandad Fred holding Kevin’s son Matthew, Dad Ian and Kevin (‘Flutes’). Photo: Supplied

“Dad had lots of farming mates who’d come down and go out on the boat on a Sunday, sometimes getting a bit worse for wear so I’d steer the boat into the harbour,” he grins.

A trained electrician, Flutes had been nagging to leave Kingswell High School and man his dad’s oyster boat.

“He wouldn’t let me until I got a trade.”

He trained as an electrician completing a six-year apprenticeship, working as an electrician while rowing in Christchurch.

After 10 years oystering, forced redundancies in the industry saw him reluctantly working at a fish factory and driving trucks.

Not even serious motion sickness held him back from those boats though.

Flutes and Debbie with the grandkids. Photo: Supplied

Twenty years with Southport followed and for the past six years Flutes has been making salt ice at Southfish and delivering it to the fishing boats.

The pallet drop-off he turned into firewood during Covid times was just typical of the heart of the man who delivered it to the elderly and those in need.

“One guy nearly ripped the bag out of my hand he was that cold,” he says. But the work of a volunteer man never ends, it seems.

“I always help out when someone asks me.”

However, Flutes reckons it’s his wife and family, including three sons, who should be honoured for their years of understanding.

“I’m an electrician and the lights on that new kitchen were hanging off the ceiling for quite some time,” he grins.

There’s always time for the grandchildren though, who recently called on ‘Gong Gong’, as they call him, to collect the floats for the preschool Santa parade.

A kind man’s work is never done.