People are the backbone of our industry - Australian MarineBusinessWorld.com newsletter
by Peter Rendle 31 Oct 2019 16:00 PDT
Alistair Murray and Daniel Belcher © Gregg Porteous
The marine industry employs a wide selection of people and their special skills contribute to the well-being of the industry. This week some of the stalwarts have changed their roles.
At the 2019 Annual General Meeting of Australian Sailing held at the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia Daniel Belcher (President) and Alistair Murray AM (Vice President) will lead a new-look Board after long-term President (Matt Allen AM) and Vice President (Sarah Kenny) finished their terms at the AGM. Belcher has been on the Board of Australian Sailing since October 2014 and is currently the Managing Director of investment management firm Redwood North. Alistair has had a 44-year career at Ronstan during which he has established Ronstan as a world leader in the sailing industry. Along the way he has been recognised with numerous national and international awards and headed up the world forum for the sailing industry, the International Sailing Summit. He is an active racing sailor.
In Sydney, Australian Ocean Performance brand Vaikobi, continues its expansion into the sailing market with the recent appointment of Australian Marine industry member Paul Schulz as their Global Sales Manager. Paul comes to Vaikobi after owning and operating the Gill Marine distributorship in Australia for the past fifteen years and is a positive addition to the Vaikobi team at what is an exciting time for the brand. Vaikobi's Pat Langley commented, "We are super excited to have someone of Paul's calibre join our team and in particular head up global sales for our growing brand. Paul needs no introduction inside the Australian Marine industry and brings a vast amount of experience which will be invaluable for the Global Vaikobi business moving forward."
The charter yacht industry attracts a welcome stream of overseas tourist dollars to the Australian economy and the high standard of our charter companies is reflected in the awards they win. With just shy of 400 people from across the Whitsundays' tourism & business sectors, the industry got together last Friday evening at the newly reopened Daydream Island Resort to celebrate the annual night-of-nights' at the 2019 Whitsunday Tourism Awards. Recognising businesses that have a solid business plan and continually innovate their products, Cumberland Charter Yachts took out silver at this year's awards ceremony for 'Unique Accommodation', focusing on the uniqueness of the tourism experience and having an unconventional accommodation style.
Overseas, Vesper Marine, a leading provider of innovative marine hardware and software, announced recently that Cortex has been nominated for the highly prestigious DAME Design Award, in the marine electronics and marine related software category. The announcement of the winner of the DAME Design Award 2019 will took place during the METSTRADE Breakfast Briefing in the Forum of RAI Amsterdam on Tuesday, November 19, 2019.
New Electronic products were announced by B&G® this week. The world's leading sailing navigation and instrument specialist announced the launch of HALO20+ and HALO2 Radars - a pair of compact, lightweight, pulse compression radome units, perfectly designed for smaller sailboats. This award-winning HALO series will now include two new models in addition to the HALO24 that will suit the wider sailing audience. Both new radars will be 20 inches in diameter, weigh only 5kg and will provide excellent detection with unrivalled short-range performance, but HALO20+ features one of the fastest RPM rotations on the market, VelocityTrack™, Dual Range operation and can also detect targets from a greater distance than HALO20.
And success stories are always a good read. Internationally-renowned and award-winning wildlife and underwater cinematographer, Tom Campbell, and his scientist and film-maker partner, Beth Davidow, travel the world capturing spectacular footage and images for a variety of clients and media. Their next big adventure all started with a clipping on Tom's bathroom mirror. The couple who produce wildlife and nature documentaries for media outlets such as the BBC, National Geographic and The Discovery Channel, along with a wide variety of private clients, plan to spend the next stage of their adventurous lives travelling to exotic locations in their M51 Maritimo motor yacht and filming everything from giant manta rays and blue whales, to great white sharks and other marine wildlife.
Aveagooden!
Peter Rendle peter.rendle@sail-world.com