PHOTOGRAPHS: GETTY; CORBIS; JEFF BROWN
QUICKFIRE
Brian
O’SullivanSPEED OR STYLE
Style
IDEA OF LUXURY?
Simplicity
FIRST THING YOU PACK?
An Oh Henry! chocolate bar
FAVOURITE BEACH?
Whitehaven in the
Whitsundays , Aust ralia
HOW MANY WATCHES?
Two... three, no – six!
CHAUFFEUR OR CHEF?
Chef
FIRST BOATING MEMORY
The launch of my father’s
home-built boat in 1961. I threw
up. It was the last time I ever
got seasick
FAVOURITE CAR?
Ford Explorer.IjustsoldaBentley.
I’m done with luxTop right: New Zealand
a big impression on O’Sullivan, who built one
of the largest wind energy companies in the
US. Top left: a Baja whale sharkthe sea. I remember going up to Desolation
Sound with prawns aplenty and lots of friends.
And all the pressure, whether it was being
a young lawyer or being a young windmill guy,
just sort of evaporated in this environment.
I think my whole life has been spent trying
to recreate that dissipation of pressure.”
You’d think someone so keen to de-stress
would spend most of his time on board
Komokwa on a sunpad, occasionally reaching
for his beer, but instead O’Sullivan is in the
wheelhouse, or on the flybridge, operating the
yacht himself. Of the 25,000 miles the boat
has done since he took ownership, only 2,000
were completed without him at the helm. He
was initially refused insurance because of his
insistence on being an owner-operator, but
three weeks of skipper school and an aced
exam in Fort Lauderdale convinced Lloyd ’s
he was a safe bet.
He began his big trip west by going south,
as Komokwa made passage from Vancouver
to LA, San Diego and on to Cabo San Lucas
and La Paz on the Baja Peninsula. “We wanted
to swim with whale sharks,” O’Sullivan
explains. Then it was on to Puerto Vallarta
further south in Mexico, before a straight shot
across to the Marquesas – 15 days at sea. A
month in Tonga and a month in Fiji followed,
as well as visits to some of the other island
paradises that pepper the Pacific, including
Bora Bora, Moorea and Papeete. He put into
Sydney in Australia to get some work done, but
encounters with aggressive customs oicials
(“they quarantined the boat for two days! They
even went through the crew’s underwear, piece
by piece”) and a quote for AUD$8,000 to wash
down the boat saw him quickly crossing the
Tasman to New Zealand. “We cruised all of
the North Island. It’s really beautiful. I wish
I could have spent more time there,” he says.
The spectre of Somalian piracy and a
destabilised Yemen convinced him to load
Komokwa on to a Dockwise transport boundst sold a Bentley.
xury carsd’sNorthIslandmadeMOVIE MOGUL?
A brief encounter
O’Sullivan dabbled in
films, producing the 1988
“turkey” Dangerous Love.
He then chose not to invest
in another film – Dumb and
Dumber – that did rather
better. He loved Cannes,
but thinks that “movie
people are crazy”69