The endless summer continues to roll on for Kiwi yachtswoman and sailing coach Penny Whiting – it just looks a little different nowadays, writes Sarah Ell.
Come Friday afternoons, sailing icon Penny Whiting can still be found down at Westhaven Marina getting ready for a rum race. It’s just that nowadays her crew is a little smaller – not in numbers, but physically. Nowadays her six-year-old grandson Jax is often part of the crew who slip the ropes and motor out onto the harbour, just as Whiting has been doing all her life.
Penny, now 73, and her sailing school have become an intrinsic part of Auckland’s maritime landscape. She’s sailed all over the world, dined with royalty, been on the city council and put her organisational skills and force of personality to work for several charities. Her 13.7m yacht, Endless Summer, has hosted thousands of wannabe sailors over the last 50 years, learning the ropes – literally – with the benefit of Whiting’s vast experience and sense of humour. In recent years, health issues and, latterly, the covid pandemic, have seen her ease into a sort of retirement, but one which still involves sailing her beloved yacht.
The Whiting family built Endless Summer to a design by her late brother Paul Whiting. She’s just as immaculate as when she was launched, despite the fact in the past four decades an estimated 33,000 people have come “clattering aboard” ready for their learn-to-sail session. A few electronics have been added – a new Garmin chartplotter and a TV which can be pivoted around so the screen can be seen in the cockpit, when the America’s Cup is on – but “apart from that, she’s pretty much as she always was when I started with her forty years ago,” Penny says. “I spent quite a bit of money when I put her together, so she would last.”
Endless Summer has recently been repowered, with the encouragement of brother Tony, a marine engineer and long-distance cruiser. He owns Taranui III, the sister ship to Endless Summer and another of the 16 Whiting 45s built.
“He said to me, hey sis, I’m replacing my engine, you should replace yours too, but I didn’t want to go through all the mess and hassle,” Penny says. “But then I thought that I really need reliability so I took a deep breath and said right, let’s do this. I just couldn’t stand the idea of the chaos!”
Looking around the immaculate interior of Endless Summer you can understand Penny’s reluctance; everything is shipshape, from the matching sets of wet weather gear hanging in the bow to the coffee cups in the galley. “But as I was getting older and less mobile, crawling around under the engine to see what’s going on was not that appealing – I decided this was a much better idea.”
The new Yanmar 4JH 80 CR (common-rail) diesel, supplied and installed by Power Equipment (see sidebar), is much more efficient and quieter than the previous model – important when it sits in the middle of the saloon, under the table. Penny says the difference between it and the previous iteration is “like comparing a new smartphone with an old brick phone.”
The repowering was almost completed when Auckland fell into last year’s extended Delta lockdown, so Endless Summer was marooned in the yard for quite a few months before hitting the water for the remains of the 2021–22 summer.
She’s not quite the workhorse she used to be, however, with Penny scaling back her eponymous sailing school. The family sail-training dynasty continues, however, in the form of Penny’s son Carl, better known (ironically) as ‘Tiny’. Carl, who owns Davidson 55 Emotional Rescue, one of the iconic race boats of the late 80s and early 90s, has taken over the learn-to-sail side of the business, partnering with the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron to run the more advanced levels of its learn-to-sail programme.
“They start off doing level one in the MRX, then on Emotional Rescue Carl takes them up to Kawau on a Friday night and they stay at Lidgard House, then on the Saturday they get to sail around Kawau Bay. She’s such a fast boat, they can cover a lot of miles before they come back on Sunday,” Penny says. She’s concentrating on doing smaller, more intimate charters, taking couples or small groups for three days and two nights away cruising around the gulf.
“It’s still a learn-to-sail experience – they get to do a bit of everything, I’m not doing it all,” she says. As well as actually sailing the boat, the training also includes the practicalities of living afloat – “all the fun stuff. It’s just as much teaching people to cook and how to live on the boat, how to use water, swimming off the boat, using the outboard.”
Covid restrictions and lockdowns have taken their toll on the charter and learn-to-sail business, but things had already changed from the heyday when she would be running three three-hour sessions a day all summer, morning, afternoons and evenings. “Back when I started I had the housewives, the mothers, and about 60 per cent of my clients were women,” Penny says. “ But what’s a housewife any more – more women are working. And the afternoon people were normally internationals or from out of Auckland, who would fly in to do the course and fly out, back to the US or Europe.
“I was in absolute heaven, sailing every day in the summer, but the body gave up. I’ve got arthritis and a few other health things. Unfortunately it’s expensive to keep these boats in survey if they’re not working, but we’ll see how this season goes. The boat’s not done much work in a year but she’s ready to go.”
Scaling back the sailing school means there’s more time for cruising. “I was always very traditional in having my three weeks off at Christmas and going sailing – I’ve always done that, still do. I like my cruising and I’m going to do a whole lot more. I’ve been very committed for all these years to the sailing school and have absolutely no regrets.”
It also means more time for family, on and off the water. “I take Jax sailing and he’s great on the boat – he can wind the sail in,” Penny says. “He said to me recently ‘we’ve had the whole weekend and we haven’t gone sailing’, so I said grab your gear and let’s go for a sail.”
Two of her older grandchildren are also following in the family footsteps: Carl’s sons Crue and Ryder Ellis, who have recently swapped codes and have exchanged competitive rowing for the RNZYS Youth Training Programme.
“They have sailed with me on and off all their lives, and also with Carl. I used to take them away for ten days at the end of January, right from when they were little. It was a holiday for them then but now they really know the mechanics of sailing and are loving the Youth Training Programme.”
Along with Carl’s wife Jasmine, the boys also recently purchased Smokey Joe, a Whiting Quarter Tonner that Carl owned 27 years ago with Cameron Appleton and David Endean.
“The boys are looking forward to the traditional Christmas cruise with Endless Summer and Emotional Rescue,” Penny says. “It’s so great for us because we didn’t push them to it, they came to it in their own time. Who knows where it might take them?”
Well, if they’re anything like their grandmother, that could be just about anywhere . . . and they’ll have a great ride doing it.
The new heart
The Yanmar JH-CR range is a new generation of lightweight, low-emissions diesel engines with full electronic control, utilising a common-rail fuel injection system like those already used in vehicle and industrial engines. The common-rail system improves the combustion process by injecting the fuel directly into the cylinder, maximising performance and reducing both fuel consumption and emissions. The timing and number of fuel injections are electronically optimised, resulting in less unburned fuel in the exhaust gas, meaning it is less dense and there is less unpleasant odour when running under low load. The engines have also been designed to provide low vibration and noise – another plus on sailboats when the engine is often positioned in the saloon, as it is on Endless Summer.
“I just couldn’t be happier,” Penny Whiting says.
“At my age, it’d be nice if it did another twenty years!”
