Sailing To Work
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday July 11, 1998
Some people simply live to sail. Others have been smart enough to make sailing their living.
THE OCEAN is their office, suits are something they wear for survival, and boats are a way of never having to deal with peak-hour traffic again. For an elite group of professional sailors based - occasionally - in Sydney, work is an odyssey that carries them to the most extreme corners of the globe.
Work for Don and Margie McIntyre means sailing their yacht south to their little holiday hut in Antarctica - it must be maintained, y'know. Or pointing the bow north to thaw-out in the Barrier Reef for a project such as last year's Expedition Reefbound. At worst, it means planning another far-flung trip away from their terrestrial office in Sydney.
The McIntyres, mobile and motile, have made it their mission to work with nature at large, using their 60-ft Ben Lexcen-designed alloy yacht as a means of getting around. They send electronic "postcards" back home to inspire others to consider what's out there, beyond the city walls.
Part of their undertaking is to create Web sites with live video clips, photos and voice dispatches. During Expedition Reefbound, up to 1.7 million Americans regularly logged-on to the McIntyres' site to see what the intrepid couple were up to.
But the point they hope to make through all this is that there's more to life than, well, work.
Don, who has about 140,000 sea miles of ocean sailing experience behind him, says: "If you've been given a life and don't use it, you're stupid. What's superannuation? We don't even think about it. Money can't buy experience. We often have elderly people come up to us and say, 'We wish we had done so much more ...' That's sad."
A certified mariner at age 18, when he began doing boat deliveries, Don has cruised through the Pacific on a homemade yacht, competed in the single-handed BOC around-the-world race, and sailed to Antarctica three times. After being the first couple to live for a year in Antarctica in 1995, the McIntyres were declared Australian Geographic Adventurers of the Year.
They received only the 10th Gold Medal award, which is usually reserved for adventurers living out their twilight years.
But these days, Don prefers to describe himself as "a pie-fingerer". He and Margie have fingers in lots of pies: film-making, expeditions, importing marine gear. There are five projects on the go at the moment, including plans for a float plane and a bigger yacht.
They say their unorthodox version of work gives them thrills that no office job can. With financial assistance from companies such as Microsoft, government agencies and any number of marine companies, they sail to far-off places at least once a year to produce live and informative Web sites with educational value.
Last year - the International Year of the Reef - the McIntyres spent seven months cruising around the Barrier Reef to gather material to promote awareness of the value of coral reefs, for which they won an Invision award - an American award for Web site excellence. They had a bigger American than local audience, though schoolkids in the Whitsundays, who had followed their year in Antarctica on the Web, soon discovered their whereabouts and begged visits to their yacht.
In Townsville, the yacht was transformed into a research centre and, for three weeks, the McIntyres worked with biologists and scientists on a project called "Clam Chowder". This meant checking clams which had been released two years earlier to determine the effects of possible pollution.
The idea for Expedition Reefbound came after a year writing a book and creating a documentary about living the previous year in Antarctica. It was while they were in Antarctica, naturally, that Don and Margie turned their thoughts to the Barrier Reef.
BEING a professional sailor can be unsettling as it puts a different spin on the world and it isn't great for your personal life, says Adrienne Cahalan, a dashing and much sought-after yacht navigator who describes herself as "yachtsman/solicitor".
"For me, sailing is my career. For those who back me it's an advertising opportunity. Mostly, what I do are big commercial projects," she says, pointing to her last job as navigator aboard a 92-ft catamaran called Royal Sun Alliance, which set out from England to break the around-the-world sailing record earlier this year.
Sadly, the giant sailing boat, which is about the same length as a tennis court, faltered on day 43 when it dropped its rig in the Southern Ocean. Which explains why Cahalan is back at her desk playing maritime lawyer.
"I spend more than half the year on the water," she says. "It is definitely a job and I always enjoy going to work out there. But in the city, working five days a week, I'm just so tired."
For a professional sailor of Cahalan's cal-ibre, you must be fit and ready to turn up for work anywhere in the world. She has done two circumnavigations including a Whitbread Race, eight Sydney to Hobarts, three Fastnets and three Transatlantic races - about 100,000 sea miles in all.
Her next project is likely to be back as navigator on Royal Sun Alliance, which is planning another tilt at the round-the-world-sailing record early next year. Then there's The Race, a round-the-world speed event staged by the sailing-mad French, beginning on midnight in 2000.
"In Australia, you can't cut a full-time living from being a professional sailor, whereas in places like France people come running down the dock for your autograph," she says.
DAVID ADAMS stands out as the man with the runs on the board - 300,000 ocean miles in races such as the single-handed BOC Challenge. Whatever it is Adams is sailing, from the maxi-yacht Brindabella to the Soling he is campaigning for the Olympics, he typically spends half the year on the water and the other half talking about it as a motivational speaker.
For the first 60 days of this year he was competing in The Gold Race from New York to San Francisco on a 60-footer with his good friend and fellow single-handed sailing veteran Isabelle Autissier.
"On the water I'm very much in business mode. I often wonder why you would sail for fun. I try to be focused, for this is my work," Adams says.
Meantime, the McIntyres are planning to take a Japanese film crew to Auckland and Macquarie islands in the Southern Ocean in December to film the cute royal and the rare yellow-eye penguins.
Then it's back to Antarctica in January for some housekeeping - something you can help them do if you're not afraid of, well, hard work.
Actually, Don says you mainly just "hang-out" when you're in Antarctica.
Sailing for Antarctica
IF YOU'RE prepared to wear four pairs of gloves, four different head coverings and four separate body layers, and can stand working in temp-eratures below minus 30C in the windiest place on earth, you could sail with the McIntyres on their 60-ft yacht to Antarctica in January.
You would need some night-sailing experience, have to know one end of a boat from the other, and possess a certain degree of intestinal fortitude. Spirit of Sydney sails on January 2 from Bluff, New Zealand, to the McIntyres' hut in Commonwealth Bay, then back to Hobart and Sydney. The six-week round trip will cost $10,000.
If that sounds daunting, there are still some spots on Spirit of Sydney for a four-day soft adventure sail from Sydney to Hobart in early November. The cost is $400, plus air fares.
Details: McIntyre Marine, (02) 9979 8525.
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald
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