Greetings to Bay Area Sailors From Alistair Murray, Down Under

It was “just the other day” that Alistair Murray was living in San Rafael and bringing Ronstan hardware from the shores of Australia to the US. While here in the early ’90s he raced the company 11M, Ronstan, in John Sweeney’s very cool sponsored ProAm Citibank Cup, which was held right off Pier 39.

Fast forward a few decades and Alistair is now the non-executive chairman of Ronstan, VP of Australia Sailing, and is back home in the Ronstan headquarters of Melbourne, Australia — lying at about latitude 38 south. Alistair recently wrote to say that as his once-active international travel schedule has been severely curtailed by the pandemic, he’s racing a new-to-him Archambault 31 named Arch de Triomphe.

He also wrote in, saying, “Say hi to the crew at Latitude, which I look forward to every month … my favourite [Aussie for favorite] sailing mag in the whole world.”

We checked in with John Sweeney, looking for photos of the 11M fleet, and instead, he sent along a video of one of his early sponsored regattas featuring Paul Cayard, Jeff Madrigali, Dawn Riley, Morgan Larson, Betsy Allison, Carissa Harris, Annie Gardner and other notable sailors of the time. We’d forgotten what a spectacle it was and how much fun they were.

Frontier Productions Citibank Cup Sailing Regatta from Frontier Productions on Vimeo.

Thanks for the note, Alistair, and for staying in touch across oceans and time.