Robert Braithwaite

It was wonderful.

And when you turned up and, you know, in the days of Robert Braithwaite on the Sunseeker stand-

Yeah, yeah, yeah

... and, you know, there'd be a grand opening of the show-

That's hard.

And it was a period of time that was really formative because... not having any money and really being sort of hand to mouth in terms of what you could do to try to get into the market but the first thing we did and often business stories are about people and connections and very very early on we we knew we could build a really nice looking wooden boat and we did do, and we wrote to three people in the industry, in our British industry, to say, look, we're two young guys in our 20s, we've built this boat, and we're coming to Earls Court Boat Show in London with a wooden boat, really nice to meet you, could you come and have a look? So Robert Braithwaite from Sunseeker, David King from Princess and at that time Gerard Wainwright from Sealine.

And I wrote a handwritten letter to each of them and all three of them showed up at the boat show.

to come and look at what we'd created.

and me as a sort of 25 year old 28 year old young person with no track record or no status in the industry had to go and knock on a boat show like this go and try and meet people and literally say look you don't know me but Here's what we do.

Can we show you, can we demonstrate the bow or whatever? And I bumped into some really, really good people, sort of the elder statesmen of our industry that some of which are still around and some sadly not.

But, you know, I've mentioned David King from Princess and Robert Braithwaite from Sunseeker.

But another really important guy was Tilly Antonelli.