Don McGlashan on the lake at Takapuna. Picture / Martin Sykes

Don McGlashan on the lake at Takapuna. Picture / Martin Sykes

Don McGlashan has a fresh wind in his sails. Well, sail.

For on this Anzac Day morning we are sitting in his Laser as the singer-songwriter finds a puff of breeze and the craft picks up a few knots across the dark brown waters of Takapuna's Lake Pupuke.

It only has the one mainsail. And on breezier days even that can be more than enough for the short but solid McGlashan.

So with variable winds out of the northwest and only the swans and some waka ama teams for company we splash about going nowhere in particular. We talk, the conversation punctuated by Captain Don's observations on the flukey breeze and polite commands to go about.

The reason for this waterborne chat is ostensibly his long-anticipated post-Mutton Birds solo album Warm Hand. As he rigged the boat earlier he found the idea ironic.

"This is the only place I don't think about music."

But sailing on Pupuke also represents something of McGlashan's life past and present.

He grew up a few streets away in Milford.

He'd spend his Wednesday afternoons at Westlake Boys' High sailing and daydreaming. He sailed competitively through his teens, just as music took hold and his talents bloomed.

It was the start of what's been a richly diverse career, from the punk and post-punk years of the Plague and Blam, Blam, Blam, the theatrical-musical-comedy-film troupe the Front Lawn, and the return to rock'n'roll with the Mutton Birds.

Along the way there's also been McGlashan the composer with soundtrack work for everything from An Angel at My Table to television's Street Legal to this year's No. 2 - he wrote the gospel-styled Hollie Smith-sung Bathe in The River which became a surprise top 10 hit.

Five or six years ago, having returned from Britain to eventually call it a day on the Mutton Birds - the band he guided through four studio albums and many international airport terminals through the mid- to late-90s - he found himself back at Pupuke.

He was here to start fulfilling those sailing daydreams he had when stuck in a tour van somewhere Up Over. He came down one Wednesday night.

"And there were all these blokes furiously thrashing around in their lasers swearing at each other and having the time of their lives. I thought, 'that looks like fun'."

He bought himself a Laser, joined the Pupuke Boat Club, which, with its windowless green shed on the lakeshore, has possibly the most modest yacht club house in the country.