The pictures above show our working life. Judy was Africa Correspondent for the UK’s Channel Four News and I worked with her as her cameraman/editor for many years. We met at work. I think it was in an edit suite after a frantic shoot but neither of us can really remember. The relationship evolved rather than hit us between the eyes.
There is a bond between journalists who work under pressure of deadlines and, in our case, in hostile environments so we learned to rely on each other quite quickly. Our skills complement each other and we know enough about how the other works to pull together when things get tricky and that is proving very helpful in the world of sailing too!
When we had children we were based in London and travelling together became impossible. So Judy turned to news reading, rather than reporting, and I joined the BBC UK based news team where I covered events in the south east of England for twelve years. We also moved out of London to live in the countryside to bring up our three girls.
We have always had our own company, Streamline Productions, so that we can follow projects we are interested in as documentaries. These are usually shot in Africa. As the children got older we travelled to Africa and other parts of the world more often and also started to train journalists and filmmakers working in hostile environments.
If you’re wondering how I got Judy (a non sailor) to agree to a life on a boat the answer is we keep making films and visiting interesting places. That, and we bought a boat with a ‘proper’ bed, a shower, room for the children to visit and I agreed to head South. Phew. Eventually she was happy.
Giving up the day job is quite a big step. We’re not pensioners, yet, so still have to make some sort of living. We’re fortunate as we can still make films for broadcast and run training programs for journalists. That will become more tricky as we sail to remote areas but we are giving ourselves a couple of years in the Mediterranean before heading further afield.
The YouTube channel is a complete unknown for us. The biggest shock is instant feedback! We never got that in broadcast. We knew lots of people watched the programmes we made, and we hoped they were well received, but very few people rang up the broadcaster to give their comments. We have always enjoyed watching other sailing channels both for fun and to learn about what other people are doing. We hope our channel will add to the mix you enjoy watching!
