Way to Go - Hahn Premium Hamilton Island Race Week

by Rob Kothe on 24 Aug 2006 Six girls from the Mornington Yacht Club are marking personal history on a little Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 32 chartered from Sunsail at the 23rd annual Hahn Premium Hamilton Island Race Week.

Di Kemp, Gail Brandhoff, Tonia Vertigan, Liz Fordyce-Burke, Lindy Drummond and Marg Lester have all escaped the cold Victorian winter and left their husbands and families to sail at their first ever Race Week.

Tonia Vertigan, Lindy Drummond and Di Kemp have their own boats and the crew are proud of the fact many of them are grandmothers, achieving their dreams.

Gail Brandhoff planned this adventure. ‘This is my dream. When I was on the boat with the boys at Mornington, after they had come back from Hamilton Island, I heard about their adventures and I just knew that I wanted to come here. I thought about it for a couple of years and said to myself, ‘I’d love to go’, but I did not want to go with them, they pee over the back of the boat and all that stuff.

‘This year in May, I asked Di Kemp if she would she be willing to skipper us. She said yes, we had some meetings and here we are!

‘The first start was very exciting ... all these big boats pouring down with their spinnakers and right at the back there was us.

‘In the first race, we were nearly at the finish line, when the officials started pulling up the gear, we’d run out of time, so that was a bit disappointing. It was just amazing in our second race, as we backed down into our Sunsail berth, the other crews all stood and cheered as we came into the dock. Yesterday was a great result, we came fourth.’

Excited they were, as Di Kemp explains. ‘I woke up at 4am this morning. I was so excited I thought to myself I just can’t believe this, this is one of the biggest achievements of my life, I am so proud of the girls, we are up here and we are doing it!'

Di, who has been keelboating for 14 years is a dinghy sailing instructor and she hand picked the bunch of girls. ‘Well’ says Di, ‘A group of mature age women actually, not young chicks, we range from 48 to 61.’

‘For all the crew, this has been a whole learning experience’, Di continues ‘because if we are sailing with our husbands or other guys and if anything goes wrong, the men yell, or just rush and do things. Here I’ve been letting everyone work through the problems and it’s so much better.’

‘It’s a fabulous experience. Everyone is just so friendly and helpful. We’ve been talking so much, I am losing my voice. We’ve been to the cocktail parties, we all have our little BD’s...little black dresses...everywhere we go it’s a lot of fun.’

From the back of the group came this well rehearsed line. ‘None of us have been to Race Week before, we flew in on Virgin Airlines, so that makes us Race Week Virgins, but we are going back on Jetstar, so we won’t be Virgins any more!!.’

Kim McKee from Sunsail Hamilton Island, is delighted the ‘Way to Go’ crew are here. ‘This is our first ever all girl crew to compete in Race Week on a Sunsail Yacht.

‘We have 20 of our 29 monohulls competing in Race Week and most of the other yachts are on regular charters. We have six charter groups who are repeat clients from last year, so it’s great to see the event attracting new comers like the Way to Go team, as well as our regulars back again.

‘We have one yacht which has been booked by singles and they are competing under the Sunsail Sailing School banner with two of our instructors onboard to give them a better insight into racing. This has proven to be very popular so will definitely be offering two singles yachts next year.’

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