Major surgery hasn't slowed down sailing trailblazer Penny Whiting - still racing yachts at 75. Now NZ's most noted yacht club has honoured her for always going that extra mile, Suzanne McFadden writes.
Penny Whiting sensed something was up. She just couldn't decipher what.
Sitting among the crowd in the ballroom of the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, Whiting wondered why her son, Carl – an America’s Cup and Olympic sailing veteran ironically nicknamed Tiny – was also there for a run-of-the-mill AGM.
“Then I saw my brother a few rows back and thought, that’s unusual,” the 75-year-old Whiting says. “Next thing Carl’s elbowing me – and he has a big elbow – saying ‘Mum, it’s you they’re talking about’.
"I said, ‘What do you mean, it’s me?’”
It turned out Whiting was the stunned recipient of a life membership at the RNZYS, joining an elite club of just 13 living members. But she made headlines – as Whiting has so often in her prolific sailing career – as the first woman in the history of the 152-year-old yacht club to become a life member.
The woman who’s taught at least 33,000 people (almost three-quarters of them women) how to sail on the Waitemata Harbour was, of course, “thrilled and honoured”. And yet, smashing glass ceilings is nothing new to her.
In 1975, Whiting was one of the first two female members of the hallowed Squadron, the current home of the America’s Cup.
She felt grateful, too, she’d been able to walk to the stage to receive her framed life member certificate. Earlier this year, she could barely toddle down the dock – as a tumour inside her spinal cord pressed on the nerves to her legs. It was her knee surgeon who sent her for an x-ray of her spine: “I sent him a note saying: ‘You saved my life’.”
Slowly but surely, she’s recovering from the surgery to remove the benign tumour, which doctors told her had probably been there for 10 years. And last month, she was back on the water.
“I’m still racing,” she says proudly. “I race on a performance 50-footer called Bird on the Wing, where I’m the tactician, and the bossy person. All the time I was at home convalescing from my surgery, I missed that camaraderie with my sailing crew. They’re a great bunch of blokes.”
She’s planning a Christmas cruise to Whangaroa Harbour in the Far North, on board her trusty Endless Summer – the 14m yacht where, for 53 years, she taught sailing skills to tens of thousands of rookies in the Penny Whiting Sailing School.
It’s the same boat, built and designed by the Whiting family, that she took King Charles, Muhammad Ali and Fleetwood Mac sailing on. “Fleetwood Mac about four times; they would just ring me whenever they were in town,” says Whiting, who received an MBE in 1993 for services to sailing.
“The mighty Endless Summer is as good as ever. She recently got a new motor and I’ll have a couple of working bees over the next few weekends down at Westhaven to get her ready again.”
Whiting’s days of sailing up and down the coastline on her own are over now she’s not so agile. But different friends will join her on board during the summer.
She may not be as quick on her feet (even with two knee replacements, which she blames on her years playing tennis in a team called ‘The G-Strings’), but Whiting has lost none of her trademark exuberance, vim, humour and candour.
Looking out over the Waitemata from her new penthouse apartment, she talks with tenderness of her 10 grandkids, who are helping keep the Whiting sailing dynasty alive. The eldest boys – Carl’s teenage sons Crüe and Ryder Ellis – are already sailing overseas. Crüe just finished second in the Maxi worlds in Palma, and Ryder is crewing in the Ocean Global Race, sailed in the spirit of the 1973 Whitbread round-the-world race, in the leg from Cape Town to Auckland.
“From when they were little, the two big boys and I would take off in January for 10 days on Endless Summer and sail all around the [Hauraki] Gulf,” says Penny, who the grandkids call Bunny.
The sailing genes hark back to the boys’ great grandfather, renowned Auckland cruising sailor D’Arcy Whiting.
Penny, born on Auckland Anniversary regatta day in 1949, was two when she first went sailing with her dad. She remembers the day he turned up at her school when she was 14 to collect her and younger brother Paul to race from Auckland to Noumea. “We went sailing offshore for three months!” she hoots.
Whiting left school the day she turned 15, armed with her driver’s licence and her first job at Sails and Covers, with Kiwi sailing legends Tony and Chris Bouzaid. (Sixty years on, it was Chris who nominated her for the RNZYS life membership).
At 19, she started her sailing school, and ran it virtually single-handedly for over half a century, till she stepped away from the helm in 2017.
“I absolutely feel proud. I always had 10 or 12 people aboard for three hours, twice a day, seven days a week, for five months every summer,” she says. “And I loved it because people learned to sail.
“They would come on board frightened and unnerved, but in a group environment they suddenly realised all the other people, male and female, had the same issues.
“The 33,000 adults who went through the school, I enjoyed every one of them. I got Christmas cards for years when they were in fashion: ‘You taught me to sail and now I’m sailing in Greece’. In the supermarket when people come up to me and say, ‘You taught me how to sail’, I wish they’d say their name - I would recognise them because I prided myself in knowing everyone’s name who came sailing.”
Whiting brought up her two children with the help of former husband and sports commentator, Doc Williams, while running her eponymous school.
Its success, she says, came from sticking to the basics and her decision not to extend the school into elite sailing.
“Get the building blocks right, and the rest will come. If you have the basic skills, you can go sailing with anybody. I always told them – sailing isn’t about strength, it’s all about timing. If it’s hard to do, you’re doing it the wrong damn way,” she says.
The majority of her sailing clients were women, and for the first three years the ‘Lady Penelope Sailing School’ was female-only. “But then I realised women didn’t need to learn to race; people needed to learn to sail,” says Whiting.
“But I think the pathways for women in sailing now are huge. There’s so much opportunity - women on board the SailGP, and now the Womens’ America’s Cup in the AC40s. I’m not sure I agree a lot with segregation… having women’s-only or men's-only events. I really like to see mixed crews.”
Sailing against men was the reason why, 48 years ago, Whiting applied to become a member of the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron with another female sailor, Rachel Upton.
Legend has it when Whiting’s request came up before the committee, there was initially silence, followed by a member’s question: “Will she use the urinal, or does she expect us to build her a toilet?”
Whiting was driven to become a member so she could race against the Squadron commodore. “I owned a boat named Avian, and John McKenzie, the commodore at the time, owned its sister ship, Sirius. And I wasn’t allowed to race him unless I was a member,” she says.
Her first chance was a 27 nautical-mile race to Te Kouma Harbour on the Coromandel Peninsular.
“I got an all-girls crew and my mum made us pink lace visors that we wore with pink t-shirts, blue miniskirts and pink underwear. We got on the startline with the kite up and haired off down the harbour - and we pipped the commodore,” she says.
Whiting is still a regular sight at the RNZYS, where she teaches practical coastal navigation. “I race down with my suitcase of rulers, dividers and rubbers and make them to do navigation like we used to. So if their phone goes flat and they can’t get their GPS, they can read their latitudes and longitudes,” she says.
She still takes couples out on Endless Summer for a two-night, three-day sailing class around Waiheke Island. “They’re usually people who want to buy their first boat,” Whiting says.
But it’s clear her life isn’t all about sailing: “There are so many other things you can turn your hand to.”
She paints, and many of her works hang in her apartment alongside her father’s art (including watercolours he painted while fighting in World War II), and copper sculptures by her welder niece in Australia.
A few days a week, she hand-makes French appliques for furniture in her old garage, supplying markets in New Zealand and Australia.
An Auckland city councillor for two terms in the 1990s, Whiting only recently relinquished her role as chair of the Auckland Zoo Charitable Trust, where she raised millions of dollars to revamp the Zoo. She still has a soft spot for it, and can hear the high-pitched calls of the Siamang monkeys from her bedroom window.
Where she once spent her winters sailing in the Northern Hemisphere (hence the "endless summers"), she hasn't travelled a lot since the Covid pandemic.
She knows she needs to slow down a bit, now. “Being up here in the clouds watching the weather rolling in, I’ve kind of enjoyed it,” she says.
But the call of the sea is loud and clear from there, too.
