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John Newnham is one of the most well- liked and respected members of the Phuket Yacht Club and can regularly
be seen competing in regatta and club races on his Firefly Twin Sharks with his stellar crew.
John hails from Cowes, on the Isle of Wight in the UK. When he was young, he started sailing on dinghies, and as he grew older started hitching rides on bigger boats.
At age 18, he went off to study a three- year sandwich course (six months of college, six months working in the industry) at college in Bristol, which was subsidized by Shell. When he graduated, he did various marketing jobs and went sailing in-between jobs, moving up from crewing on small keelboats to crewing on large keelboats and eventually sports boats.
John then landed a job as a product man- ager on the Isle of Wight for the Bristol-based Dickinson Robertson company, one of the world's largest stationery and packaging compa- nies. He continued to sail even more since back then if you did any representative sailing (sailing for your country) you could claim six weeks extra holiday.
However, one day his boss called him into his office and suggested he made a decision as to what was most important to him...a career or sailing. As John was due to fly to Australia the next week for three weeks sailing he asked if we could discuss that on his return.
This was evidently not the answer his boss wanted and his redundancy package was on his desk when he returned.
He was given a great redundancy pack- age and the boss suggested that one day John would thank him...a suggestion that at the time was hard to accept.
At around that time John bought a J24, which for a couple of years he towed to regattas in the UK and Europe. Despite a reasonable amount of success (his best result was second in the UK Nationals), it was obvious that if John wanted to move onto the bigger boat circuit it would not be as a helmsman. With profession- alism really starting to kick in there was a queue of Olympians and World Champions lining up to race and helm on the evolving Grand Prix circuit.
John then jumped on the big boat Grand Prix circuit as a headsail trimmer and for a
number of years followed the circuit that started in Australia in December culminating in the Hobart race (biannually), then to a couple of regattas in Florida in January and February, on out to the Caribbean circuit, back to the States and Bermuda Race or down to Hawaii and then down to the Mediterranean and back to the UK for the Fastnet in August and then Sardinia and Italy in the autumn. It was an awesome circuit and a great life.
He started his company Marineware
35 years ago in Southampton and had a couple of people run the office fending off complaints while he sailed the world, doing numerous yacht races. “I kidded myself I was making great contacts,” John recalls, “when I was really just having a wonderful time sailing with my mates.”