You might say Cameron Riddell was destined to be a sailor before he was even born. His parents’ romance was kindled on the ocean and they married after sailing a yacht across the Pacific in the 1950s, in an era when such an adventure was something of a moonshot.
Riddell’s outlook, his spirit of adventure and his lifelong passion for sailing and classic yachts all make sense if you know this extraordinary story. It starts with a young man sitting with friends in a waterfront bar in Vancouver. There is a 16-metre steel ketch named Romayne lying nearby with a “for sale” sign hanging on the bow. His friends egg him on: “Let’s buy that boat and sail round the world.”
“My father, Stuart Riddell, had inherited some money from his mother, so he bought the yacht,” says Cameron. “It’s kind of crazy when you think about it. He never sailed before, none of them had, but when he told all his friends that he had bought the yacht, they all agreed to go. The seller of the boat agreed to teach them all to sail, and he did, and they went off into the Pacific.”
