Before heading to the first SailGP Lyttelton event, top sailor Liv Mackay returned home to the devastated Esk Valley to help with the clean-up. And she knows she'll have her community behind her on the water this weekend.
Dressed in her swannie and gumboots, Liv Mackay wades through the mud and floodwaters still covering her family's orchard and farmland in the Esk Valley of Hawkes Bay.
Far removed from the glamour of sailing foiling cats around the globe, she scratches her farm dogs under the chin and takes in the devastation Cyclone Gabrielle wreaked in the valley she grew up in.
Mackay has just spent five days back at her home, getting to work collecting the debris strewn through the orchard. Odd kids' shoes, mattresses and “so much plastic rubbish, that’s been blowing into the ocean”. She shared a video of the destruction and disarray.
“I wanted to document it – that’s the most important part of my life,” the professional sailor says. “It’s been really devastating; seriously brutal.
"Our house was saved, but we’ve lost a huge amount of land – our avocado and mandarin orchards and the farm - that's been badly damaged. The hard thing is Dad’s worked on that land for 35 years, and my granddad helped him work on it, too. It’s a huge part of who we are."
On the day the Esk River overflowed four weeks ago, Mackay’s dad, Hugo, went across farmlands and through surrounding orchards in a jet boat, rescuing neighbours stranded on their rooves in the rising floodwaters. “It’s hard to comprehend,” says Mackay. “But it could have been a lot worse.”
Liv Mackay posted this video of the scenes at her family orchard and surrounding countryside in Esk Valley
The people of Esk Valley continue to lean on each other.
“The community is super-powerful. Everyone went through an extremely traumatic experience together, and they’re all still helping each other,” Mackay says.
Now she's asking her dad to drop his shovel, leave the clean-up, and fly to Christchurch this weekend to watch her sail.
As tough as it is, Mackay has had to switch her focus to one of the biggest regattas in her career – joining her New Zealand SailGP team-mates in Lyttelton for the first SailGP event to be contested on Kiwi waters.
“I feel like I’m good at switching off and switching on to racing when we head out on the water,” she says. “It’s been great to be able to reset and have something really positive in Christchurch to look forward to.”
The previous event on the SailGP circuit in Sydney – when New Zealand was still reeling from the supercharged tropical storm - was an emotionally challenging experience for Mackay and some of her team-mates. The New Zealand team all wore black armbands for those who lost their lives in the cyclone.
“When I flew over to Sydney, I hadn’t been able to speak to my parents properly. I was distraught,” Mackay says. “Mum had called me at 5.30am to ask if we were okay. She said: ‘The valley is fully gone and your dad is out helping rescue people’. And then the call cut off.
“I couldn’t get through to them again for two or three days. A few other people in the team are from the eastern region – [grinder] Louis Sinclair is from Wairoa, and a couple of others in our wider team. So we had a really strong connection to those areas badly affected, but some of us hadn’t heard from our families.”
The team struggled on the water, too, battling with technical issues on a borrowed boat after their F50 catamaran, Amokura, was out of action - struck by lightning in Singapore (after New Zealand won their third grand prix title). The second day of racing in Sydney was abandoned after a rogue storm swept through the SailGP base, causing serious damage to wingsails and boats.
But the New Zealand team, headed by Pete Burling and Blair Tuke, managed to stay in second place overall - behind Australia - leading into the final event to garner points towards making the top three boats to sail in the US$1 million winner-takes-all grand final in San Francisco in May.
“You can really feel the excitement in the team,” says Mackay, who’ll be the sole woman on board the repaired Amokura in Lyttelton. “Racing at home in our black boat again is a special thing.
“It’s important for us to approach it as just another event, and we’re here to perform. We’re definitely here to win. But everyone has this underlying feeling of excitement and pride that we finally get to share this with New Zealanders.”
The global SailGP regatta, created by Kiwi Sir Russell Coutts, is in its third season, but this is the first time it’s reached New Zealand shores. Plans to bring the event to Christchurch in 2022 were scuppered by Covid restrictions.
All nine boats in the series will line up on Saturday and Sunday afternoons to race in the harbour’s natural ampitheatre, with most of the damage from the two freak weather events now fixed. The New Zealand F50 has been through rigorous testing and repairs in Warkworth, after the lightning travelled down the wingsail and out to all four corners of the boat.
“It feels like it’s been a massive effort from the team to get to this point,” Mackay says. “You can definitely feel the buzz around. I can’t really believe it’s all happening – it felt like a far-off dream.”
She’s excited her supportive parents and friends from the Hawkes Bay will be there to witness it.
Mackay has sailed on Lyttelton Harbour twice before, as a young teen sailing and Optimist and a 420 dinghy.
It’s been a hectic time for Mackay, who’s also spent six weeks working with Emirates Team New Zealand, driving one of the two AC40 boats in their first two-boat trialing programme in a decade. She’s hoping to be onboard New Zealand’s AC40 in the first Women’s America’s Cup event in Barcelona next year.
“The experience was so good in so many regards. It was six weeks of intense learning,” she says. “The boats are epic, and the team were great.
“I really got chucked in the deep end, which I loved. It was windy for the first two weeks, and they were ‘Just jump in’. I think it’s the best way to learn.”
Soon, Mackay will head to Europe to prepare for a second season helming the Live Ocean Racing crew on the ETF26 foiling catamaran series.
Sailing under the banner of Live Ocean – Burling and Tuke’s environmental mission - Mackay has become more aware of the ocean’s health. And that’s been important while she’s been in the Hawkes Bay.
“The scary thing is the amount of rubbish that’s blowing into the sea – it’s everywhere,” she says. “It’s a huge conversation Dad and I have been having. He’s the one pushing to get rid of it - to get in and pick up the rubbish before it goes into the ocean.”
Her New Zealand SailGP team have been supportive, she says, encouraging her to go back home as often as she can to help with the clean-up. And she’s discovered the people back home are counting on her to lift their spirits through her sailing.
“All the neighbours say: ‘We see you on TV and it’s amazing; it’s so cool you’re from here and doing this'. They’ll be watching on the weekend and that means such a lot to me,” she says.
“We laughed about making sure Dad gets on that plane.
"It’s really cool to know the people where I’m from are behind me, and they know I’m behind them too. The most important part of me is there.”
* Racing in the SailGP Lyttelton event runs over the weekend, with starts at 3pm on both days. There's live coverage on Sky Sport 2 on Saturday, and Sky Sport 4 on Sunday.
