He has inspected the ship every year since then and now, as he retires from the post, the "Lady of the Lake" is in great shape for its centenary. James Beech asked him about the vessel's transformation.
Adam Love, veteran surveyor of ships and first-class combined foreign-going chief engineer, knows every inch of Queenstown's historic steamship Earnslaw better than most.
Mr Love's word is law when it comes to a ship's seaworthiness and he has inspected the "Lady of the Lake" every year since 1976, until his final inspection this week, before retirement after the Christmas holidays.
The Scotsman decided if the Earnslaw was "fit for the purpose for which it is being used".
However, he remembered it was a "stretch of the imagination" to give his approval to the vintage ship when he first encountered it in a wretched state in 1976.
"But now, I wish I was in such good condition," he laughed.
The Otago Daily Times sat down for a conversation with Mr Love in the first class-saloon on Thursday, while dozens of Real Journeys staff and contractors quickly, but calmly, worked on the ship's finishing touches after eight weeks of survey work.
Originally from Glasgow and still speaking with the accent, the sprightly 79-year-old, who looks half his age, came to New Zealand in 1975 after he retired from the Royal Navy.
He was a chief engineer with a cargo-passenger line, and a reservist lieutenant-commander, after his 21-year naval career.
"All my adult life's been spent on ships," he said.
"I started in John Brown's Shipyards in Clydebank in 1949 and I was 16 or so.
"I served my time as a marine engineer and I was working on big ships.
"Some of them were military, some commercial.
"We [the shipyard] built all the big ships, the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, in John Brown's and I worked on the Royal Yacht Britannia when I was an apprentice.
"She was built at John Brown's.
"I used to work on the Queen Mary because they used to send engineers and apprentices from Clydebank down to Southampton to do repairs and things like that on them."
Mr Love said he always had thought to join the navy and wanted to go to the Royal Naval College in London.
But it was just after World War 2 and his mother was not keen on letting him go into the service.
"She said, 'If you go and serve your time, you can go to sea then,' so I did and I made a career of it until I came here in 1975.
"I took a job here with the old marine division of the Ministry of Transport.
"It was an opportunity and it meant I was working in the same field as I'd always been, so I've never really worked in anything else other than ship repairs, ship management, ship sailing and surveying.
"I'd been brought up in these ships; I'd sailed in these triple-expansion ships for 13 years and nine years as chief engineer."
Based then as now in Invercargill, he said Queenstown was in his patch when he became district manager for the ministry in 1982.
He administered the Boilers, Lifts and Cranes Act 1950 and the Shipping and Seamen Act 1952, among other legislation of the day, until privatisation bit in 1992.
Asked to describe Earnslaw's condition when he first saw the ship 36 years ago, Mr Love said: "She was a wreck.
"She was very sad, but I had sailed in ships in the early 1950s which had been built in the 1930s and had gone through the war without any maintenance.
"And after the war, when I was sailing on them, we never had any spares, so I was used to ships that were wrecks.
"So when I came here and people said, 'Oh, she's a wreck,' I said, 'Oh well, I've seen worse.'
"So it became a challenge."
Mr Love said it was a very slow process getting the Earnslaw back up to standard.
Fiordland Travel, the previous name of owner-operator Real Journeys, always provided the money and had always been good about maintenance, he said.
"Now she's 300% the ship she ever was.
"There's no comparison between what it was back in the 1970s and what it is now.
"Back in the mid-1960s, [New Zealand] Railways was ready to abandon it.
"They said, 'Within five years the boilers will be stuffed,' that's how much they knew.
"Their solution for the Earnslaw was to take it out on the lake and scuttle it.
"Of course, then commercial interests became interested and Fiordland Travel actually leased the Earnslaw for some years before they bought it."
Mr Love oversaw each annual survey, by crawling through tight spaces for inspection, taking photographic records and discussing how best to fix any issues within the hull with the chief engineer and contractors.
It was always a work in progress, he said.
He also surveyed passenger ships and fishing boats in Queenstown, Te Anau, Milford Sound and Manapouri, and on occasion Port Chalmers and even Western Australia as jobs demanded.
He used to have a team of five surveyors of ships, but today he was the only surveyor based in Invercargill for SGS New Zealand Ltd, part of a multinational inspection company headquartered in Geneva.
"There's so few of us left because our traditional source of ship surveyors was the sea and ships now are manned by only three or four engineers at the most, whereas I used to have seven or eight, or 10."
Asked if fewer qualified watchdogs meant compromises in maritime safety, Mr Love said the authorities were always trying to improve safety and he mentioned both Safe Ship Management and the Maritime Operator Safety System (MOSS), expected to be in place by mid-2013.
"One of our then chief executives said to me years ago, 'Adam, where can I get more ship surveyors?
"I said 'I know where there's plenty of them.' I said, 'In the bloody cemetery, because that's the only place you'll find them."' he said with a laugh.
Mr Love is a family man with a wife, three sons, a daughter, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild, almost all living nearby in the South.
He said he would like to retire before he turned 80, and the reason he had not retired years earlier was he loved the job.
