They don’t come much more multi-talented than this. Aside from his sailing achievements – including, remember winning the 2005 Volvo Race on ABN Amro – Stan Honey is a member of the US National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds 31 technology patents and is regarded by many in the industry as the father of vehicle navigation. Don’t take our word for it… ‘What Stan has done – from the glowing puck to the 1st and 10 NFL line to tracking Nascar (stock cars) in a three-dimensional space – has completely changed the viewer experience. Stan’s inventive, curious mind has left an indelible legacy on sports production in the USA and around the world.’ That summing-up from David Hill, the founding president of Fox Sports who would later move on to launch Sky TV in the UK
– another visionary, Stan says. ‘Murdoch had already thought it all through to what would eventually be Google Maps. And that classified ads and yellow pages would all be replaced by people asking the elec- tronic question: “Where’s the nearest…?”’ Meanwhile, ETAK had the highest-
quality digital roadmap database of North America. ‘And we were working on Japan. So [Murdoch] acquired the company for that reason.’ Though it wasn’t a windfall, Stan says, ‘we all made good money.’ Meanwhile, Sally had started The Spin-
naker Shop to serve Palo Alto sailors, but once the harbour silted up the raceboats left. Luckily, however, her shop was ‘right around the corner’ from Silicon Valley… Customers coming in for sail repairs
asked if she could also make covers for their technical projects (the cone of a jet engine, say) and, like any good entrepre- neur, she always said yes. ‘So now I was forced to learn how to read engineering drawings and meet full specs and do all the testing and so forth,’ she says. ‘One of our more interesting jobs was
doing the Kevlar straps for the space shuttle, following the Challenger disaster.’ Industrial sewing for the aerospace, electronics and medical industries turned out to be ‘a little more lucrative, and much more thought- provoking than another sail repair’. Eventually Sally was able to name her
price when it came to dealing with the top companies, Stan explains. ‘They’d know it would be perfect. It would be on time. And, compared to the cost of a satellite, a cover costs like, nothing.’ Stan’s career was evolving as well. After a
62 SEAHORSE
few unhappy years flying around the world explaining technology’s future to the top guns at Murdoch’s News Corp (‘What is the internet, and how is this going to affect our business?’), he formed the News Corp Tech- nology Group and went back to what he loved: innovating and building cool stuff. Their first creation was an electronic blue dot that made it easier to follow hockey pucks on TV – a significant improvement for casual viewers, though diehard hockey fans hated it.
‘I try to avoid talking about the puck, with Canadians especially,’ Stan jokes now. But the Honeys’ hand-to-mouth phase was over.
Rounding the mark Of course, they weren’t yet ‘the Honeys’ – because they didn’t marry until 1996. When I ask why, they both laugh and again Stan asks which story I want. Again I say ‘all of them,’ and again he jumps in first. ‘You may remember there was an era where you couldn’t use a partner’s fre- quent flyer miles unless you were married? That’s why she finally said yes…’ Finally – how many times did he ask?
‘Well, it was just kind of a continuous question…’ By the mid-1990s Sally had ‘gone
around enough buoys’ so they gave up 505 sailing and bought a Cal 40, thinking they would go off cruising. Instead, as racing ‘creatures of habit’, they did a major refit (and Sally built all new sails) and then sailed their first double-handed offshore race, the 1990 Pacific Cup from San Francisco to Hawaii. Sally had never used an autopilot before – and even though Stan had programmed
theirs, ‘I didn’t trust this little thing that was supposed to be steering! I was used to having somebody on the tiller the whole time.’ They finished second in the double- handed division, but both remember it more for the white-knuckle ‘face of God’ squall they lived through. In the middle of the night Sally says, ‘the whole sky turned black and I said, “Ah, Stan, come up, please. I may need your help.”’ By then, they both agree, it was far too windy to take the kite down. ‘You know what they say about spin-
nakers,’ Stan quips; ‘we set them, and God takes them down! That was actually the sensible approach in a Cal 40. Planing at 25kt, and the boat was perfectly balanced. I couldn’t believe nothing broke.’ Six years later they won PacCup overall
– besting even the fully crewed boats. Afterwards they sailed back to San Fran- cisco via Alaska and Vancouver – and discovered that indeed they both loved cruising. Sally: ‘It was just hilarious because we had no dodger, no heater, a German shepherd – and, for the first part, no anchor windlass. Even so we had a wonderful summer standing in the rain. ‘We decided we were going to spend
three years sailing around the world,’ she adds. And at last getting around to her reason for finally saying yes, she adds: ‘We thought it might be better in foreign coun- tries, or if one of us got sick, to have the same name.’ They got hitched on the beach at Half Moon Bay. ‘That was a good party,’ she remembers. ‘And the nice thing about waiting 20 years is that you both have a similar group of friends.’
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