Rob was born in 1953 in Auckland New Zealand, second child of parents who had lived through the Great Depression and served during the Second World War. He has learned to live with the ‘Baby Boomer’ label.

Rob was six years old when his father bought the first family yacht, a 22ft Woolacott keel boat which the family used as often as possible, going away weekends and holidays cruising the Hauraki Gulf and the north coast as far as the Bay of Islands. When the time came to purchase a bigger yacht, Rob was ready to learn to sail the sailing dinghy tender which went with the new boat. He quickly learned the skills of sailing and experienced the feelings of independence at a young age, always ready to escape parental and family restrictions whenever the chance presented.

Eventually he joined the local dinghy sailing club and began racing his ‘Sabot’ with the club fleet, using his commitment to his racing as the exuse to avoid having to join the rest of the family on what became cloying and boring weekends away in the family yacht. He managed to find a friend to stay with each weekend so he could pursue his own sailing schedule, and at the same time bask in his feelings of this illicit freedom from the family unit.

Over the years he moved through the local dinghy racing classes, occasionally with his friends cruising away in their ‘Sunburst’ racing dinghies, which seemed a sacrilegious act to the more fanatical of the race fraternity, using the boats as…cruising boats??? But these ‘adventures’, one of which became a major media event, was the beginning of a lifetime of doing things a little ‘differently’

After the dinghies came the keelboat racing, the pinnacle being the Sydney-Hobart race at age 20 in 1974. Having decided to carry on with his travels in spite of protest from well meaning friends, he and another friend sailed a yacht from Hobart to Perth and then headed up the west coat of West Australia in an old car they bought for $150. It was on this drive, early one morning in the dry Spinifex country, as they sat on the bonnet of the car waiting for a herd of cattle to be driven past by ‘real’ cowboys, that he experienced a most profound and deep feeling of freedom, the impact of which caused him to make a vow. He vowed that he would keep that feeling with him in everything he would do in his coming life. 

Thirty years later he still treasures that feeling, having, over the years incorporated it into his work career, and every other aspect of his life to the point where he has been able to write a book about it. For him his life has been an amazing journey of experiences and observations, which in the last fifteen years has seemed to focus on how we treat the environment and how we treat each other. His recent adventures have brought home to him how important it is for humanity to now work toward getting these things right if we are to have a place for our children to exist in a clean, quality, safe and inspiring environment. This book is his life’s journey, as he has lived it, how he has dealt with the lessons of his experiences and what his hope for the future is.

It is also his hope that there might be something of use in the book for whoever reads it.