Sailsman

I’ve sailed all of my life. When I was little, we lived in Maple Bay on Vancouver Island, and I started small-boat sailing when I was around six years old.

When I was 10, in the ’40s, my father was building Lightning sailboats, and I got my first racing trophy.

Last November, I brought back a 50-foot sailboat that was custom-built for me in New Zealand. It’s a high-tech, high-performance sailboat. I went down in August to do sea trials, and we christened it there with champagne – although we didn’t waste the champagne completely.

In my married life, I’ve had four boats and the whole family sails. We work together at the family business and we race boats together. I’ll race locally with my two sons in English Bay and the Gulf of Georgia, and we’ve also done four ocean races from Victoria to Maui. The longest took 16 and a half days.

Balancing sailing with work and family was never a problem. In fact, it helps to get away from the stress. When you step off the dock onto a sailboat and go out to race, your focus is totally on the crew and the boat and the competition.

You see some amazing things when you’re out on the ocean. In the daytime, you see schools of dolphins: hundreds and hundreds of them. At night, they dive at your boat and play in the waves. And in Hawaii, you wake up in the morning and there’s these flying fish on the deck. They fly off the waves and then they land on the deck! It’s spectacular.