Just say
‘Yes’
Perhaps the most surprising thing about sailing legends Stan and Sally Honey is their humility. It’s as if they don’t under- stand why we’d ever be interested in how they tacked and gybed their way to the top of our sport – while also transforming several high-tech industries. How did they accomplish so much? After almost two hours of asking questions I conclude it was a unique combination of luck, skill and two glass-half-full personalities that are, after almost a half century together, deliciously intertwined. In hindsight at least, their life together plays out like a very tactical sailboat race, so let’s fire off the first gun.
The start: opposite coasts Stan grew up in Los Angeles sailing out to Catalina with his parents, and racing dinghies. He quickly developed an interest in big boats, and ‘back then, at all levels, the sailors had the common sense to never leave an interested kid on the dock.’ And once he got interested in navigation owners quickly let him have a go. ‘Before long I found myself as the primary navigator of the Mexico races and even Hawaii races. And that was back when it was hard, because that was all dead reckoning and celestial…’ ‘And you were only 17 or 18,’ Sally
points out. She grew up in New Jersey, and at 20 did a Transatlantic with her father on a little New York 32. She didn’t start racing dinghies until her second marriage – to small boat champion and cutting-edge boatbuilder Mark Lindsay – when she started sailing the 505. ‘I was on the wire and it was fabulous –
until we did the Worlds in Santa Cruz where it blew 35 the whole time,’ she chuckles. ‘There were seven of us women sailing, wearing five cotton sweatshirts hosed down at the start. ‘Mark and I had been finishing in the
60 SEAHORSE
top three in New England and we finished 43rd! And it was like, uh, you know, you’re 6ft 2in and 200lb. So the next season we swapped places. It took me a season to figure out [steering a dinghy] because I’d grown up on big boats.’ The reorganised team won the North Americans, as well as several Bermuda Race Weeks and the big CORK Regatta in Ontario. But the marriage to Mark didn’t last.
The first cross When I ask Stan and Sally how they met Stan’s boyish dimples – which grow deep- est whenever he talks about Sally – appear: ‘Which story do you want?’ Almost before I can respond (‘all of
them’) he’s taking us back to the mid- 1970s, when he was a student at Yale and sailing 505s with Sally’s boss. ‘We would run across one another at regattas, and I would admire Sally’s helmsmanship. I was quite in awe of her reputation as a sailor.’ But they didn’t meet face to face until
after Sally moved from Massachusetts to Connecticut to run the One Design depart- ment for the local North loft. Stan was living at the Yale Corinthian Yacht Club (YCYC), and one afternoon Sally showed
up with a Volvo 122S that wouldn’t start. ‘I was able to fix it very easily,’ Stan says. ‘And I upgraded 505 skippers!’ Sally jumps in with her own memories;
‘a friend had mentioned a handy guy who lived at YCYC and also owned a 122S… ‘So I towed the car down there, and I
thought he was pretty nice looking. And then he didn’t charge me! Wow. What a guy.’ She’s smiling too, even as she remem- bers the challenge her new teammate issued before they drove to their first regatta together. ‘Stan said, “We’ve got to look at the [trailer] bearings. Do you know how to do that?” And I said, “Uh, that’s my trailer but, no, I’ve never done that.” So my first really big test was to get my hands all greasy… I guess I passed.’ Sally and her young son Tam soon
moved into the downstairs bedroom at YCYC; Steve Benjamin and Peter Isler lived upstairs. It was a fantastic learning environment, Stan remembers. ‘A lot of Olympic training crews would come through and sail with us. Carl Buchan would show up for a week, stay in the living room and sail our team practices… There was a lot of talent in the air.’ Sally remembers the fabulous boat shop
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