Licensed to keel

Andrew Mathieson
A CRUDELY constructed boat unravelled from designs among some dusty, old yachting books was Frant and Addy Bucek’s first steps to world champions.
The boat was the surreal dream of an ingenious nine-year-old boy who spent every spare moment reading about yachts deep inside the bowels of the public library.
“Every sailing book in the Geelong Regional Library I knew off by heart,” Frant remembers.
Little sister Addy now sits back giggling when recalling Frant’s unbridled enthusiasm for learning the craft of boat building.
Their first boat was pretty small – tiny, in fact, according to Addy – but it didn’t matter to them.
Frant and older brother Jnda built it from scratch and sailed it off Limeburner’s Point near their Newcomb home.
“It was very sailable, still,” Frant insists.
“We kept it for years and all of us learned to sail in it.”
All five siblings would take their turn in that boat and, decades on, both Frant and Addy’s five children took up cruising the bay, too, under instruction at Royal Geelong Yacht Club.
The family’s passion for sailing was traced to a few black and white photos strewn around their house.
Their father used to sail boats around Corio Bay but that was before the children’s time.
“He also kept the mast and the sails and they were stored in the attic,” Frant recalls.
“As little kids, it did enough to keep us all intrigued about it.”
Frant and Addy – despite their four-year age difference – were a class above the rest in the international cadet class together.
The 17-year-old brother and 13-year-old sister went on to represent Australia at the 1974 World International Cadet Championships in Portugal.
“When we first started doing well there was an astonishment that we had improved in one season so dramatically,” Addy notes.
“I remember we had come from being just one of the teams to suddenly winning all the time.”
Addy, at first, was still blase about their chances and thought they were there to make up the numbers.
Frant didn’t share the opinion, though.
The two brothers had already competed in the 1969 championships at Hobart and Frant and Addy also helped prepare the Australian representatives the year before their journey.
They took all before them off Europe’s Iberian Peninsula to win the point series format.
“The last day got fogged out didn’t it?” Addy asks Frant.
He nods in agreement.
“Everybody just mobbed us on that day,” Frant reminisces, “and then threw us into the Atlantic Ocean – I think it is.
“That’s right,” Addy responds.
“There were only five metres of visibility because of this sea fog that had rolled in.”
The tight-knit pair, however, was forced to split.
Frant was soon too old for the cadets and joined Jnda in their attempts to campaign for a place at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
And after the IOC introduced women’s sailing in 1986, Addy qualified with Jenni Lidgett for the 1992 and 1996 games in the 470 class.
They finished a respectable ninth and seventh.
“I had to work so hard to get there at first and I think the biggest reward was the opening ceremony at Barcelona,” she says.
While Addy nowadays passes on tips to eager students at Geelong Grammar School, Frant has discovered speed sailing, in the form of windsurfing.
He takes a GPS (Global Positioning System) on the board to record the number of clicks and hopes to hit a speed of 40 knots soon.
It’s also taught him a new trick or two.
“To me, windsurfing is the purest of all sailing,” Frant argues.
“You’ve got the sail, the board, the wind and nothing else.”