60 seconds with Christine Linhart

1. How old were you when you first stepped on a boat? I was ten when I first stepped onto a keel boat called Flyaway which my family owned. I was 33 when I stepped onto my first dingy (at DBSC), and have never looked back!

2. If money (and sailing ability) were no limit, what boat would you buy? Something I could cruise around the world on.

3. What is your ultimate sailing goal? To always love being on the water in my Laser as much as I do now. I have zero competitive aspirations.

4. Tell us the story behind the name of your Laser? It was called PEBDAT when I bought it (problems exist between deck and tiller). The letters DAT subsequently fell off, so I used a permanent marker to fill in the letter to call her PEBBLES. As in Pebbles and Bam-Bam.

5. If you could add any ingredient to DBSC's world’s best toasties – what would it be? Fresh chilli.

6. What are your second/third favourite hobbies (assuming sailing is #1)? Swimming in the ocean, bush walking.

7. Describe what you do for work in less than five words? Improve the health of populations.

8. What is the first international destination you will travel to (once we're allowed) and why? United Kingdom, to introduce my son to his grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and all the people who are dying to meet him for the first time.

9. What is your favourite TV show, movie, and/or book? The unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera.

10. Tell us something interesting about yourself that members of the club don’t know? When I was 24 and between finishing university and getting a job, a friend called and asked if I was free to help him deliver a boat from Sydney to the Caribbean. I said yes and we left a few days later. We ended up living on the boat for 10 months doing the delivery as we slowly meandered through the Pacific, Asia, Africa and South America. We covered 15,000 miles at sea and stopped in 14 countries. Without doubt one of the happiest years of my life, and the best impulsive ‘yes’ responses I’ve ever given (there have been many!).

2010 – my first equator crossing, and all the initiation rituals (fish tales around my neck, buckets of rancid fish guts water thrown on me) that King Neptune and his offsiders Poseidon & Davey Jones could conjure up.