Jill Upchurch
Where do I start? I was born an inland girl with not a thought of sailing in my head. And then it happened - I fell in love with a sea-side boy. A sea-side boy who had watched yachts sail by his family's farm during summer while he was working on the hills overlooking the bay. You can see where I'm going with this, can't you? Before long, there I was, requisitioned for moving ballast on a 18' trailer yacht, sailed by 2 guys who had no idea what they were doing. Not the ideal start to a passion that has been a constant in my life for the last 20 years.
After some months of this, we bought our first boat, a 24' Spencer Adrian plywood keeler, named Sailon, which we promptly changed to Powderfinger (being more pragmatic than superstitious when it came to these things, and being fans of Neil Young, and not realising the sort of ribaldry it would attract from passing boats). Having been promoted from ballast to first mate, I took some sailing lessons from NZ yachting legend Penny Whiting and learned not to scream every time the boat heeled over. I also became deeply unpopular with the skipper for my pious uttering of "That's not how Penny does it." at fraught intervals, but lets not go there.
I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised when, coming home one evening from a rather alcoholic evening with friends, my beloved announced his lifelong wish of sailing around the world. Oh bugger! I thought, well I guess I had better go too. So we did our courses and hitchhiked the Pacific, ending up running a flotilla of yachts in Greece.
When we arrived back from our OE (Overseas Experience, the rite of passage for young Kiwis) in 1987, we settled down to become good citizens and earn a bit of money. This lasted until we went to party for a fellow flotilla worker who had arrived in NZ on the Whitbread Around the World Yacht Race in 1990 at which I drunkenly announced (is there a theme emerging here?) that what they needed was a cook. And a couple of weeks later, there I was, a Whitbread sailor, on my way around Cape Horn bound for Punta Del Este. One leg of that was enough to convince me I was a cruiser not a racer, and that palm trees were more my style than icebergs, so I headed home to Auckland, where we bought a 24" Sparkman & Stephens Falcon keeler called Festina Lente (make haste slowly).
We had many more good years on Festina, sailing the North East coast of NZ until one three-week holiday from which Bruce, at six feet tall, emerged semi-crippled and demanded head room. We scouted for several months, seeing nothing that had the magic combination of being suitable (we had offshore in mind) and affordable, until we drove past an old double-ender up on the hardstand near the Westhaven Marina shops. We stalked her without actually articulating our interest to each other, until one day we looked at each other and said, well, we could just look at it.... and with that we climbed on, went below, sat at the table, looked at each other and knew we had found our new boat. At that stage we had no idea what design she was or the noble history of the Kendall/Westsail, we just knew she was exactly what we wanted, so, with the formality of a test sail later, she became ours.
We now had the boat, and the dream, and were on the road (a bit longer than we imagined!) to making it happen. How many people in life get to have that great privilege?