The voyage of Penny Whiting

By GRAHAM REID

Penny Whiting leans forward conspiratorially and, as much as her natural ebullience allows, speaks in a hushed tone.

"You probably can't write this, but people over the last few months would ring me and say, 'C'mon Penny, how about coming out?' And I'd say, 'No, I'm stuffing a zebra.' They didn't know what I was on about until they saw it. But I was certainly stuffing a zebra!"

She hoots with laughter - not for the first time in this conversation - as she settles in her courtside seat, where the doyenne of sailing is waiting to indulge another great passion: tennis.

These are typically interesting times for Whiting, whose name is synonymous with Auckland yachting. The woman who can claim to have taught more than 20,000 people the skills of sailing is the subject of the biography Endless Summer, byBoating New Zealand editor Rebecca Hayter, which will be published on Monday.

Whiting is also looking forward to her son, Carl, returning from Sweden, where he is sailing Whitbread 60s. And the zebra is finally stuffed.

Zeb is now on display at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, part of an annual art exhibition by club members. Whiting laughs again and admits that until Zeb she'd never so much as upholstered a footstool.

But prompted by a girlfriend in Nantucket who makes furniture in animal shapes, she undertook the project of a zebra chair.

"He's got a tongue, and hooves and real eyelashes, and he's a rocking chair," she announces triumphantly.

Zeb, of course, was a project, and she's a woman who loves a project. Good finisher, too; you'd be hard pushed to find something she had started and not completed. And often it's something you'd read about.

Plain-spoken Whiting, with an MBE for services to yachting, acknowledges that most of her life has been a public document. When young she sailed for sheer pleasure but because she was a girl, then a woman, on the decks of ocean-going racing yachts, she got the media attention.

So when she served two terms on Auckland City Council, with a specific interest in Auckland Zoo, the media were all over her again.

Now her life, previously measured out in column inches, is distilled into an occasionally self-deprecating and humorous biography, but with a revelation.

Three years ago she and Doc Williams separated after 18 years of marriage.

"Not many people know that. A lot are going to be surprised, but it's great there are so many pictures of Doc in the book. And Doc's put some lovely complimentary quotes in, as I have of him."

She briefly reminisces about their early days together: she out sailing until 9 pm and Doc, a well-known sports broadcaster, at home looking after their two young children, Erin and Carl.

"Daddy's [potato] wedges were what the kids lived for," she smiles.

Doc, still a friend, now lives in Blenheim and she reminds herself to get him a copy of the book before its launch at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron.

She acknowledges it was, for the most part, a good marriage: "I always had my freedom. I'd say, 'I'm going off cruising in Turkey with a friend, then to Monaco,' and that was fine. Freedom was not an issue, really. I've always basically done what I really wanted."

And what Whiting - born on Auckland Anniversary regatta day in 1949 - wanted to do was sail, or surf, and enjoy herself in this world.

Endless Summer is evidence that she did. Never a scholar (she admits she's not a reader, never has been), she left school after the fifth form and took a job at Sails and Covers, working with sailmakers Tony and Chris Bouzaid. She surfed, sailed the Whangarei to Noumea Race at 18 and shortly after opened her first sailing school.

She started her OE, somewhat untypically for a Kiwi girl at the time, in Hawaii, then went on to Canada. She left with a one-way fare to Honolulu and $300, "and brought home $US4000 after travelling for a year."

And that has been the way of it. Constant travelling to sail for profit or pleasure or to work as a media commentator, as a chapter in the book, "From one OE to another," illustrates. For a decade she never saw a winter at home. Then in the mid-90s she became a city councillor.

It was an unhappy experience. She screws up her face and says it was boring ("I taught myself to meditate with my eyes open").

However, she loved being involved with the zoo and having "a million dollars a year to rip bars down."

But the council experience was useful. She learned to speed read to get through the paperwork, and it kept her in one place for her kids.

"If I didn't have the council, when I finished [sailing school] in April I was liable to shoot through for five months, and I really wanted to be there for the kids in those impressionable years.

"Offers would have come up - 'Come to Spain' or 'Come racing over here' - and I would have conned Doc into letting me go. Council made me have that much more of a base. But I didn't enjoy it; I found it very difficult that you couldn't go, 'This is how we're going to do it.'

"Running your own business for 33 years means it's hard to make a decision by committee. No, politics didn't suit me."

Even today after her yachting school shuts for winter she has offers to sail internationally. The gregarious blond who can turn her hand to most things has made friends everywhere and they invite her back.

She has recently returned from two weeks in Sweden seeing Carl, where the owner of the boat gave each of the five crew a few days off: "So I filled their positions, wherever they were. Normally, I'm in the cockpit or I'm a trimmer or doing steering-type things, but this time I was everywhere."

And afterwards she was dancing in local clubs with her son and his mates, just loving it. She was away six weeks and didn't spend one night in a hotel.

"And everywhere I go there is the likelihood of a yacht club and sailing. But I went to Provence, where a New Zealand girlfriend has a fabulous home with wonderful views. Every day I kept hoping some sea would appear somewhere.

"I felt funny where there was no water. I kept looking at the hills and imagined water was behind them. Very rarely do I put myself in a position that isn't close to the water."

Whiting attributes her passion for sailing to her family, but also to our being an island nation: "Very few Aucklanders, in the broadest sense, wouldn't have some affiliation with the water, whether it's fishing, sailing or whatever, especially since we've got two of the greatest oceans lapping on each side of us."

Love of life and the ocean washes the pages of Endless Summer, although the story isn't without its tragedy. Her brother Paul and his wife, Alison, were lost at sea on Smackwater Jack in the 1980 Hobart to Auckland race, and one chapter deals with the relationship between Whiting and daughter Erin.

"Most of my life has been well documented but there are things in this book I hope other families could learn from. The interviews with my parents take up about a third: that is the building block for a successful family.

"There were a few difficulties I had with my daughter during her teenage years, but if other people can learn from what she and I went through - and we are now the best of friends - then that's great. If people can learn some of the tricks she and I used to rectify things then I'm happy about that. I'm happy to admit my mistakes."

For a woman whose life has been lived in public, Whiting seems remarkably free of ego, and well-blessed.

"Yes, I've been lucky. But luck has only a certain amount to do with it. Determination and visions of dreams are powerful tools, and the hardest chapter to write was the last one, 'What now?"' So, what now?

This book isn't a full stop (the publishers limited it to 90,000 words and she can see another coming) - Carl is due home, she'd quite like to get involved in the Volvo Challenge Race as a shore-based crew/media liaison type ...

"But really, I don't know. I hope I'm not going to be alone for the rest of my life. It's not a problem or a focus, but I'd quite like to be able to do things with somebody at sometime. But who knows?

"But, for anything, you have to put in the groundwork. The dream is the door opens and it just happens, but you have to have your cards splayed wide. There are many things going around but none I'd be prepared to put in print.

"I have a great relationship with my kids, their lives are a big part of mine. I have a huge commitment to my beautiful daughter, even though she lives with her boyfriend. I still need to be there for her until I go off chasing ... "

Chasing?

" ... something."

* Endless Summer: The Penny Whiting Story by Rebecca Hayter (HarperCollins, $34.95) is published on Monday.