As told to Elisabeth Easther
When I was young, in Whangarei, dad built a 32ft sloop, in the backyard and we would cruise the Northland coast. The first time I saw my father cry was when he sold the boat to four Catholic priests. The day he handed it over to them in the Town Basin, they came aboard with a case of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes. But they were forced to sell it a year or two later because there was too much hanky panky going on — it was quite the scandal in the Catholic Church in the 1960s. We left Northland when I was 6, but sailing was in my blood.
Dad was a schoolteacher and took an exchange position on Vancouver Island when I was about 7. We lived in a little logging town and I have memories of harsh winters and not fitting in particularly well. Those years had a strong influence on me by making me fairly gregarious and comfortable with new experiences. You get a resilience from that sort of thing.
From there we went to Eugene, Oregon where dad went to university. We saw Neil Armstrong walking on the moon on a very grainy black-and-white TV. Dad worked evenings at the university gymnasium and one night, walking home past an anti-Vietnam demonstration, we were tear-gassed. It's like all your senses close down and there's just intense pain. I was about 9.
I went to a different school every year till I was 14. When I became head boy of my high school, I had a strong sense of other people's expectations for me. Supposedly I was the sort of person who went to law school, but I pulled out at the last minute and worked in a boat yard in Whangarei. I joined the boatyard's owner as a crew member in the Whangarei to Noumea yacht race. There were six of us on a little 32ft boat, and we ended up getting lost because the sextant got damaged — this was before GPS — and we ended up in the New Hebrides. As we approached the coast in the middle of the night, we could smell reefs and we realised it wasn't New Caledonia, partly because we couldn't see the lighthouse. We anchored till daylight, and the skipper decided we should all have some rum. I was sent to get coke from the bilges but the cans had rusted through so we had to drink the rum straight. Then we turned around with our tails between our legs and sailed to New Caledonia where everyone else was celebrating. We were one of the last boats in and I've never had rum since.