Sydney by Sail

by Nancy Knudsen on 16 May 2006 Sydney by Sail, successful yacht charter business run by Olympian Matt Hayes, is nothing if not flexible, with a wide range of offers for potential charterers.

One programme even offers you the floating version of Bed n Breakfast. You can take this programme even if you can’t sail a metre. Turn up at around 5.00pm and Sydney by Sail will sail you to a mooring for the evening, provide a gourmet dinner, then collect you the next morning.

‘Since we introduced the idea couple of years ago,’ says Matt, ‘we can’t keep up with the demand. We average more than two a week year round, and the numbers just keep growing!’

It’s innovative ideas like this that have kept Hayes business going from strength to strength, even being twice a finalist in the Telstra Small Business Awards. With a string of sailing successes from the time he was a child, it was almost inevitable that Matt would one day finish up at the Olympics, and he did it in 1996, ending as one of the world’s top ten sailors in the soling class at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. After that he went on to off-shore sailing, with such well known figures as Syd Fischer aboard Ragamuffin and Geoff Boettcher on Hardy’s Secret Men’s Business.

However it wasn’t his strong background in sailing alone that led him into establishing ‘Sydney by Sail’

‘Right in the middle of my serious Soling sailing, I went in a NSW Enterprise Workshop in 1995’ he explains. ‘I knew quite a bit about sailing, so it was a natural subject for a business project. I had put together a business plan and ended up winning an Business Planning Award.

‘I took the plan to the Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour and so we started the business and it has been growing from day one.’

Having started with ‘one little humble Adams 10’, today the business caters for 8-9,000 people a year. A healthy 60% of the business in corporate, and the largest group they have ever had was a group of 456 Chinese Hyundai dealers on an incentive trip to Australia. A sailing adventure round Sydney Harbour was their final event before flying out the next day.

Matt’s natural innovativeness was brought into play.

‘We did two sailing sessions, one from 3-5pm and the other one from 5-7pm. We had 14 yachts sailing. We set up a start line and they raced around some Shark Island and Clark Island in Sydney Harbour.

‘All laughing, all smiling, they absolutely loved it. For them to go sailing in our harbour was just an absolute experience for them - sort of like us going to China and riding a bicycle along the Great Wall of China, or riding a yak through Outer Mongolia. A lot of them got involved in the sailing and did the steering and worked the winches’

‘The second sailing session a thunderstorm came through, and the second group went out in the driving rain. I think they liked it probably more than the first bunch, because they got a bit of action and a bit of weather. They were all smiling and when they came in they all had a glass of champagne. - good to be able to offer such a unique experience.

‘One of our most popular events is the Treasure Hunt; we have a tailor made treasure hunt which has been very successful. We can offer that for a group of as few as 14 up to 250 people, it is a really popular.

‘Essentially groups come down, we split them into teams of anywhere between 8 and 10 people and put them onto different yachts, we give them a safety briefing they go out to a start line, like any race, then they go across the start line, and they are given a series of envelopes, each envelope has a couple of questions that lead them to a certain part of the harbour like a bay, where they have to answer additional questions.

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‘By answering those questions they get certain clues and once they go to those bays those words will form, in a jumbled format, a name for a particular bay, where the finishing line with be.

‘The boats cross the finishing line and the first yacht with the correct answers then gets ferried to shore, they get given a treasure map and they scour this beach or bay trying to find a hidden treasure.

‘It is just fantastic fun. There are some organizations that put their whole call centres through these programs, we get a lot of repeat business because we are eleven years old and we are growing.

Of course, Sydney by Sail offers all the traditional programmes, learn to sail, bare-boat charters, corporate events. A full 80% of the people who sail with Sydney by Sail have either never been sailing, or have only sailed once or twice before. This also means that the company is doing its bit in encouraging the sport.

The age range of the new sailors is very wide. 30-60 year olds make up a significant part of the market, but there’s also a very active ‘singles’ scene, and a huge number of, in Matt’s words, ’20-somethings’.

Located conveniently at Darling Harbour in the middle of the CBD, they also do twilight racing, Saturday afternoon racing, social events, even a scheduled sailing trip for tourists who want to ‘just sail around Sydney Harbour’

The firm’s favoured sailing boat is the Hunter. ‘They are just a really good sail boat for Australian and New Zealand conditions because they are light, they’re airy, a lot of ventilation, a lot of creature comforts, in typical American fashion. Now designer Glenn Henderson put performance into the boats so they sail quite well – nice lines, nice hull shape, nice keel shape, and you can put them in Survey, which is necessary for a charter boat.

In fact, Hayes liked the boats so much that now he is importing them, and with his team of experienced Hunter skippers, they are able to include instruction as part of the sale package. ‘As we also have the boats here for charter,’ he smiles. ‘If you like one you can charter one for a couple of days to test how you react to it.’

Even though he spends all his working hours dealing with sailing from a business perspective, there’s no doubt that Matt Hayes is ‘sailing mad’.

‘I think one of the best things about sailing is that it is one of those things you can do if you’re 8 or if you’re 80. You can race, you can cruise, and you can live on a boat. I’ve got a couple of young kids now and I do spend a lot of time with them on weekends just mucking around on boats.

To find out more about Sydney by Sail, go to their Sydney by Sail website. If you're in the area you can phone on 02 9280 1110 or go down to the Maritime Museum at Sydney's Darling Harbour