Yachtie’s cock-and-bull winner

Press, 2 April 1985, Page 9

Yachtie’s cock-and-bull winner

A Christchurch yachtie is about to reap the benefit of having told the most outlandish cock-and-bull story of his life. Andrew Troup won a yacht trip from New Zealand to Easter Island aboard the Lion New Zealand. Also thrown in is some wet weather gear, yachting clothing, and an airline ticket home from Easter Island via Tahiti and Fiji. The competition organised by a division of Lion Breweries, Ltd, required the concocting of “the most outlandish cock-and-bull story you ever told” to explain how the entrant would make his way back to New Zealand from Easter Island. Items needed for a survival kit had to be listed, too. Mr Troup spent two or three months mulling over his entry after reading of the competition in a yachting magazine. He wrote his entry, his first competition attempt, in a couple of

evenings and dashed it off to his local Lion pub on the closing date, only to be told that the entries had to be in Auckland by that day and that the pub had already selected its best entry and sent it off. A month later, and one day after the winner was supposed to be announced, Mr Troup returned home from work to find a note on his front door asking him urgently to get in touch with the hotel manager. At the hotel he was told his entry had gone forward and that his was in the top three entries. He was asked if he could fly to Auckland to meet the crew. Two days later, he had been out to sea in Lion New Zealand and informed he was the competition winner. “It still came very much as a surprise then,” Mr Troup said. In thinking what he wanted in his survival kit he tried to imagine what items would be least likely to

arouse suspicions of stowing away — an integral part of his plan. The wheelbarrow, chillybin full of crunchy peanut butter sandwiches, cans of beer, and full dress uniform of an Ecuadorean admiral of the fleet that he finally decided on for his kit were held to meet this criteria. A summary of the return journey from Easter Island has Mr Troup paddling back out to Lion New Zealand in his wheelbarrow in the dead of night, towing the chillybin, and stowing away in a sail bag with his supplies. From there he jumps ship in the Canal Zone, commandeers an Ecuadorian gunboat, repossesses the Falkland Islands, and makes a full-length movie on location starring Katharine Hepburn as Margaret Thatcher, Marlon Brando as a cross section of Argentinian generals, and Ronald Reagan as himself. The proceeds of the film are used to charter the Queen Elizabeth 2 which is

then the subject of a mutiny. The journey then takes a slight detour to the Nevada Desert in Marlon Brando’s private nuclear submarine, followed by a brief space shuttle flight which ends with a splashdown in the Southern Ocean. A windsurfer rigged on an abandoned Volkswagen hull is the next mode of transport, before Mr Troup is picked up by Lion New Zealand, by now taking part in the round-the-world yacht race. His journey ends with a chartered Boeing 747 flight back to Christchurch, culminating in a belly landing outside his front gate. A few extras such as counter-ro-tating extra tropical cyclones (nicknamed Torvill and Dean) served to make Mr Troup’s story the most outlandish cock-and-bull story of the competition and earned him his place on the yacht. The real journey back to Christchurch will relieve some pressures from Mr

Troup, meaning he need no longer worry about which type of wheelbarrow would be best for the journey (“a seamless contractor’s wheelbarrow with pneumatic tyres for flotation”). Lion New Zealand will set sail from Auckland on Monday, April 14, the start of a dream journey for one keen yachtsman. Mr Troup, a mechanical engineer, was introduced to yachting about 10 years ago by a friend with a Sunburst Two years later he and another friend bought a Tasman 20 trailer-sailer between them and have sailed that since. “Yachting is one of the most important things. I love the sea and the mountains — open spaces. I just love the total mental relaxation that you can sometimes achieve,” he said last evening.

“I wouldn’t be interested if the prize was money,” he said of the competition. "It was just such an amazingly neat prize.”