Two-handed sailing involves plenty of trust so who better to race with than your significant other?
Just ask 50-something Auckland sailors Andrew Hall and Sandra Bees – now going through their final preparations for the Offshore Double Handed World Championships in France later this month.
“Honestly, I think you learn a lot about your sailing partner when you’re out there,” Hall told 1News.
“We’ve learned a lot about each other.”
It’s no surprise they work well together on the water though, considering it was sailing that allowed them to meet in the first place.
“I had been reintroduced to sailing and hopped on a boat called Margaritaville,” Bees recalled.
“I was going every Friday and doing some rum racing, just having some fun, and this chap was on one night on the main and I thought, ‘oh, he seems pretty nice and he had a nice smile and nice eyes’.”
While it took a second exchange onboard Margaritaville and an invitation to Takapuna to get things rolling, the couple have now been together for six years – and aren’t the only sailing love story tied to the now infamous vessel.
“There was more than one couple that met on Margaritaville,” Hall added with a grin. “It did get nicknamed the Love Boat for a little while.”
Those social Fridays are a far cry from the sailing the pair have been doing recently, especially Bees.
Two-handed sailing is part of the shorthand sailing family; a discipline which means racing a boat without a full crew – a new experience for Bees.
“I’ve only been seriously racing for the last sort of seven years and most of my racing has been in fully crewed boats and you don’t get to do quite as much so the skill level and training that I’ve had to lift has been quite intense.”
It’s meant plenty of time on the water outside of work to catch up to her partner – a sailor with plenty of solo and two-hand sailing under his belt including a Sydney to Hobart.
But Bees didn’t mind – and neither did the Auckland sailing community giving up their time, and sometimes even their boats, to help out.
“Just typical Kiwi fashion – you sign up for these things and then you go, ‘oh, we might need a boat to practice on,’ and we haven’t got one!
“At every spare moment I’ve been out there on the water with friends,” she added. “Every spare moment when I’m not at work I’m out on the water doing drills.”
That hard work has now paid off, with the couple one of two Kiwi entries named for the World Championships in Lorient – the spiritual home of offshore sailing.
They’ll be on of 22 mixed gender teams competing in France, needing to finish in the top five of whatever race they’re drawn into to advance to the 48-hour final on September 29.
And while they back themselves, there’s no doubt it will be a tough task.
“We all might fluff our CVs a bit but the competition is solid,” Hall said. “It’s top level. It’s not a bunch of amateurs going over there to have a jolly.”
They’ll also be racing in one of the newer one-design yacht classes created – the Sun Fast 30s – and thankfully have three days of training in Europe to assimilate themselves with it before the first race.
But along with the new experience, it’s also a chance for them to show how serious they are about making waves in the competitive scene, using the regatta they’ve paid $40,000 of their own money to attend to launch Sail IQ Racing – a team named after Hall’s business.
Hall hopes the competition will be a springboard for the team.
“We’ve been working on a canteen, 38-footer for quite some time and we’ll have that in the water next year,” Hall said.
“We want to do a lot more offshore racing in it.”
That includes taking another crack at the Sydney to Hobart.
“We would love to do it with our boat, love to get across there and actually do that and do that as a Kiwi team.”
In that case, the Love Boat probably won’t be needed any more.