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Sail-World.com : Sail-World talks to Meridien Marinas Berth Winner
Sail-World talks to Meridien Marinas Berth Winner
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Interview with Meridien Marinas Free Berthing for the next 25 years competition winner Simon Vials.
We have been talking to the still shaking long time Sail-World Cruising reader from South East Queensland who has just been announced the winner of the Meridien Marinas Free Berthing for the next 25 years competition; a prize conservatively valued at AUD$300,000, obviously the biggest prize we’ve ever had on Sail-World.com
Winner Simon Vials: I am just getting over a heart-attack at the moment. Not a real one, just how I feel after this news.
It is an amazing, amazing prize. When Adam from Meridien Marinas Horizon Shores rang me about an hour or so ago, I just didn’t believe him.
I said, yeah yeah, right. But he was serious.
I am just blown away by the whole thing. I still can’t get my head around it .... I’m amazed, I am just sort of tingling all over.
I am 48, and medicalled out of the Queensland Police Force.
I entered this competition via the Sail-World Cruising site. Here was I initially wrote before I had to shoe-horn it into the 25 word section in my entry.. ‘We live on our boat and want to buy a small home, but our savings go into berth fees and maintenance. To win this berth would change our lives; we could keep the boat, buy a home and keep cruising well into our old age.’
I have won chook raffles at the pub, but this is just something else. I am still shaking.
This berth we have won is for 25 years - just think what that berth is going to be costing people in 25 years time?
My boat Good Onya, is an old Erickson 39 footer, not quite 12 metres.
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I bought the boat two years ago in America. I had some friends in America and had them looking at boats for me. I had a budget, and went to San Francisco. I was looking at 36 footers, because that was in my budget.
The Australian dollar went through the roof, all of a sudden the boats that I thought I couldn’t afford were affordable. So I ended up just snatching this boat up, it was already set up for cruising.
I spent a couple of months in San Francisco, sailing around the area and then I set out single handed.
First I went from San Francisco to the Marquesas Islands. Then I went to Tahiti, spent a couple of weeks there and bought my partner Julie-Anne, the love of my life, a nice pearl. Then I went to Bora Bora, to the Cook Islands and onto Fiji. I got stuck there for three weeks getting my HF hooked up; I had a lighting strike nearby and blew all the high frequencies. From Fiji I went to Vanuatu and then straight home to Brisbane.
I’ve sailed a few sea miles; I must be up to 20,000 by now. I’ve done quite a few boat deliveries; Sydney Mackay, from Fremantle to Sydney, that kind of thing. I like 20 degrees north and south of the equator.
.
My girl-friend and I have been preparing to head back out into the Pacific. We are just starting the process, we were getting ready to pull the boat in August, get the top sides repainted and getting everything sorted out for this big trip, which is now just 10 months away. We have been spending a bit of a time working on the boat; nearly every day I am on there doing something.
We were worried that when we got back to Australia we would have nowhere to keep the boat, the way the prices has gone up and up, and it is harder and harder to find a marina berth.
It’s that future cost that was part of my worries ... the way things are going.
Trying to get onto a block of land and then into a house, just to have something tangible, is bad enough; you can’t easily borrow money to buy a marina berth.
Now things have changed.
We will be moving Good Onya to Horizon Shores because I am based in Brisbane – but we can move around. It makes cruising just perfect.
We might be spending a bit more time in the Whitsundays and in Cairns than we’d previously thought. The win just opens up all new horizons for us.
Now things have changed, down the track it means the boat could get bigger without a problem.
But I said to my partner a few minutes ago 'maybe we will just stay in Australia. It becomes very affordable now.'
by Sail-World.com
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12:24 AM Mon 7 Jun 2010 GMT
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