Join us for First Friday, Dinner & Guest Speakers Stephen and Dr Mara Klemich.
Prior to their recent retirement, they co-wrote the book “Above the Line: Living and Leading with Heart” and ran an international consulting company based in London. Part of their consulting work included taking the classroom into the outdoors to draw personal and teambuilding insights from real-life challenges in nature.
They are now new members of the RPAYC. Their topic for presentation at First Friday will share their experiences as a husband and wife team mountaineering and rock climbing, including preparation, safety, trust and the climbers mindset from which there will be many analogies with our own experiences in sailing, particularly husband and wife cruising teams.
The mountains they will discuss include ascents of the Matterhorn, the Eiger, Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, Imja Tse, and Lobuche.
Stephen and Mara will also reflect on their experience in 1996 while climbing Lobuche, at the time of the tragic Rob Hall disaster on Mount Everest. As they approached the summit of Lobuche, they observed a severe weather front moving in and made the decision to turn back just 100 metres short of the top. One client in particular was extremely unhappy with their decision.
That same weather system struck the nearby Everest, where eight climbers lost their lives after continuing their ascent rather than turning back, in part due to client pressure. These events later became the subject of Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air.
For our sailing group, this story carries a powerful and familiar lesson. Many of us have experienced the pressure of meeting pre arranged schedules—perhaps to rendezvous with family or friends—only to later realise that the conditions were telling us to stop. Stephen and Mara’s decision to turn back when compared with the Everest tragedy highlights the importance of recognising when to turn back, or perhaps not even set forth, even when expectations or commitments make that decision difficult.
Many of the experiences which they will share will have strong analogies with our own cruising preparation and teamwork as husband-and-wife teams.
The presentation will also share experiences rock climbing and also climbing on the Via Ferrata of the Swiss/Italian Alps. Via Ferrata means iron road and were iron reinforcing rods placed into the side of cliffs for military purposes to allow soldiers to traverse sheer rock faces during World War 1.
During dinner, Tony Nossiter will also give us a short update on developments regarding the revision of the cruising audit requirements.