Sea-Change at 29 Brings the Good Life

by Sail-World Cruising on 6 Mar 2006 Running the successful Pittwater Boating Club with his partner Chad Sheppeard may be hard work, but Allan Bridge does not regret his decision give up his engineering draftsman’s job three years ago to ‘muck about in boats’.

Pittwater Boating Club, situated in Broken Bay just north of Sydney Australia is one of the success stories of the leisure sailing market. And the secret? ‘Well,’ says Allan modestly, ‘We offer a one-stop shop - all your sailing needs in one place - marina, workshop, charter, sailing school, everything to make it easy for the leisure sailor.’

He recalls his ‘sea-change’ vividly. ‘I was working in coal processing plants - mines, roads and bridges. Some of my colleagues had been there all their lives, and I was going in the same direction.’

But one day Allan started to learn to sail at Pittwater Yacht Charter, and that turned out to be fatal for his ‘sensible’ career. As he says it today, ‘I liked it so much I bought the company’.

However it didn’t happen instantly. After becoming a competent sailor, he spent some time working in the sailing industry out of Cairns. He came back to Sydney, but not to engineering drafting. Instead, he took a job with Pittwater Boating Club (then called Pittwater Yacht Charter) and after a couple of years when the opportunity came, bought into the company. Partner and colleague Chad Sheppeard is a marine mechanic, and they share the management.

Now married with two daughters Chloe and Jasmine, Allan still goes sailing with the family when there’s a chance, but ‘to get away from the water, I sometimes also go surfing - the girls like board riding too!’.

Since Allan’s involvement in the serious side of sailing, things have changed. He says the biggest change is the way people go from no boat ownership to buying a production boat like a Beneteau, Jeanneau or a Hanse. ‘It used to be that they would buy a second hand boat first off, and then work up to bigger and better yachts. These days it doesn’t seem much of a stretch for couples to pay $230,000 or so for a boat, and it’s also now easier to borrow money for a yacht purchase.’

A NATURAL PROGRESSION:

‘When people who have never sailed before come to Pittwater Boating Club, it’s often a natural progression. They join the school, and we get them up to a charter skipper level. Then they come and charter boats for a while. The next step is to join a syndicate – as this is a small step without going the whole hog of owning a $300,000 boat. Peter Rhones at Windcraft sees it as a good way to be able to sell more boats because it is also generating interest in his product. There are already people who are using the syndicate thing as a kind of test run to see how much they will use the boat. It’s a test to see whether they want to take the next step of owning a boat outright.

SYNDICATES:

Yes, the biggest new success in Pittwater Boating Club is in the formation of syndicates, and Allan describes how it works:

‘It’s a great idea, because you can have access to a top yacht with only a small expenditure, and the truth is that one-owner boats are always used for only a tiny fraction of their potential. A syndicate can have up to 10 members, making it a very reasonable investment. You don’t have to collect the 10 members yourself, we do that, and we also manage the programme. We are already set up to do that for our yacht charters. It’s so simple for the syndicate members – just like a charter boat - you can walk on/walk off. You just need to bring your food and drink on board.

‘We market the syndicates for Windcraft, the Hanse importer, they supply the boats and we do the day-to-day management. In management terms, it is essentially the same thing as yacht charter - it is a boat that needs to be maintained, and slotted into a maintenance schedule. The main difference is that rather than having an endless number of customers you have only up to 10 customers who are actually the 10 owners of the boat.

‘We run through the boat on handover, spend half a day to a day with them running through the operation of the boat so that hopefully when they are out there they don’t have any problems. We are here to support them 24/7.

‘We’ve got the first Hanse 37 syndicate boat on the water, and it’s going well, everyone is happy with it. This particular syndicate has 9, with one unit holder that holds 2/10ths of the boat. We have more syndicates on offer now, and more boats arriving that will be available.

And Allan and Chad’s plans for the future? They are dedicated and ambitious, and a ‘24/7’ attitude seems to be the key: ‘Pittwater Boating Club is trying to be a one stop boating facility, whether it’s boating schools, yacht charter, marine mechanics and electrical work, boat management or insurance policies, we can do the lot. It all started with just Pittwater Yacht Charter, that was and still is the leading Pittwater charter fleet and from that the other businesses have grown.

‘We have a full workshop with marine mechanics and electricians, we offer yacht charter of course, the sailing school is very successful, and now the latest development is the Pittwater Boating Club Syndicate Ownership.

‘Our Bayview Anchorage marina was upgraded in December 2005, It’s a full floating facility and has about 70 berths. We have berths for all size boats – from communal boats up to 55-60 footers, and it’s a mixture of power and sailing.

FINALLY, WHY PITTWATER?

‘Pittwater is a great escape, it’s probably only 40 minutes by car from the CBD but most of the cruising area is surrounded by national park. It is vastly different from Sydney Harbour where you have commercial traffic and the Manly Ferry and five yacht clubs having a race on a Saturday. It is a lot more laid-back. They are also much easier cruising grounds than the Whitsundays - no fringing coral reef to worry about. At to the weather, you are never as isolated as you are in the Whitsundays. Probably 90% of sailors in Pittwater would be from the greater Sydney metropolitan area. Most of them tend to come for a weekend – or maybe a long weekend. During mid-week even now Pittwater is almost empty. The prices reflect that too - it is much more price competitive to charter a boat mid-week, and you have the place to yourself.

Click on Pittwater Boating Club to see their full services.

For locals, to get to Bayview Anchorage where it is located, coming from Manly or from Sydney city towards the northern peninsula you veer left at Mona Vale towards Church Point, and you will find it about 2km along on the right hand side. The facility is on the western foreshore of Pittwater, directly opposite the Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club.

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