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How it all
Began 
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Meet Glen, Director of
Expedition "Life on the Rim", husband, skipper and
sailor extraordinnaire; his big, happy grin reflecting perfectly the sheer joy of
scooting along on a brilliant sailing day on a terrific little
sailboat (our first boat,Just Reward , a
New Zealand-designed, Carter 30'). We're south-bound from Broken Bay
to Sydney Heads, in the winter of 1995, taking her to her new
home at Cammeray Marina, Sydney, Australia. |
| Here's me (Sue),
still sleepy and shivering slightly, at dawn in the winter of
1998, easingDione
away, down-wind, from Cape Capricorn, Queensland,
Australia.
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Glen & I have been together since our first date in September
1986. New Zealand is home now, though Glen grew up on the Queensland
coast and I'm a nomad I think - I've
lived everywhere! As a youngster Glen's grandfather Roy and his
uncle Dennis both loved sailing and his brother Lindsay lived to surf.
Glen sailed dinghies through school and took up windsurfing after
that. He was competing in Sydney when we met. That was at work; Glen was a systems
technician with the F/A-18 fighters and I was a technical librarian
also on the F/A-18 project. With adjacent offices, common interests and so
on, well, you get the picture.
We married in February 1988
and promptly packed up and moved
to Tindal, on the edge of the Tanami Desert, 250 miles south of Darwin
in Australia's Northern Territory - a long way from the
sea! We had windsurfers though, as well as dirt bikes and a 4x4 van, so
we divided our weekends between exploring the hot, wild bushland and
sailing on the hot, freshwater lake some folks built 'up
the track' about 100 miles north of the base at Tindal.
Being so close to Asia sparked an interest
in exploring new countries and experiencing new cultures, lifestyles,
languages and cuisine. In one magical year we 'discovered' Singapore,
Malaysia, Thailand as well as the foods of China, India, and others.
No more 'meat & three veg' for us! Returning south to live
in Sydney, we soon felt the crush of city life, missing the wild, wide, red expanses of
the north. We headed for the coastal lakes to windsurf but it wasn't
enough and we caught ourselves scanning boat ads in the
paper.
Our First Sailboat
At first, we were only looking
for a little cabin motor boat so we could spend weekends onboard with our
two four-legged buddies, Sandie and Neko. After months of searching
and researching we found ourselves the proud new owners ofJust
Reward, (so aptly named, we thought!), a Carter 30 (Half-Ton IOR Cup cruiser/racer). Never having sailed more
than a dinghy before, we took lessons on Broken Bay from a local
'Sydney-to-Hobart' legend-turned-teacher. Hooked is an understatement. We
were, quite literally, blown away. Why hadn't we discovered this sailing
business before now?!
We soon grew tired of driving two hours each way from home to the boat and so we
brought her down to Sydney from Broken Bay in July and moved on
board in August, 1995. Living on a 'cruising' marina soon had us thinking further
afield. We met many cruising folk from all over the world, listened to
their stories, checked out their boats, started buying books on cruising,
rather than just sailing. We were rapidly evolving into the sub-species
homo sapiens marinius , a close-knit clan
with specialised family groups that had spread around the globe in the very
short period of just 40 years.
It wasn't long before we, too,
aspired to the heights of this evolution - homo sapiens oceanius -
folk who had sold up
all their land-based belongings to buy a cruising boat and head out to explore the
oceans of the world. We knew that we wanted this. With
notable exceptions, our land-based friends and family thought we'd completely lost the plot.
We knew they couldn't understand so we didn't spend much time
explaining, pouring our energies into learning and preparing to 'turn left at Sydney
Heads' and not look back.
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Just Reward, gently reaching north down Pittwater, Broken Bay,
NSW, Australia; Easter 1996. We'd sailed up from Sydney with
the traditional exodus of sail and motor boats that streams
north to spend Easter nestled in a crowded anchorage in one of
the many branches of the Hawkesbury River and the Pittwater
that together form the bulk of Broken Bay. Taken at 6am
at the start of the return passage!
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