ROB AND ANDI OVERTON — R
ob and Andi Overton's story is one of endearing friendship, adventure and love — loads of it. Great buddies since they were in high school, the couple are now in their mid-70s, have done an Olympic campaign, spent 15 years cruising, raised a terrific daughter and continue to serve the sport they cherish. In the lifestyle and sport of sailing, racing and cruising are not always equal partners, but the Overtons have fully embraced both in their life on the water. At the conclusion of their cruising, the couple now live in San Francisco's Marina District, close to their daughter Lisa, as well as the Bay and the sailing it has to offer. As chairman of US Sailing's Racing Rules Committee, Rob is involved in all things having to do with regulations, such as writing, umpiring, and judging. He gives seminars on the nuances of racing rules to various clubs and fleets, and is often called up as an expert or consultant. A lifelong sailor, Rob grew up in Bellport, a small town on the south shore of Long Island, New York, where everyone just sailed. Andi grew up in a neighboring town on Long Island and went to the same high school as Rob; she was not a sailor, but a competent swimmer. She and Rob were very good — but not romantic — friends. When Rob went off to Dartmouth College, where he joined the sailing team, Andi would occasionally visit him. The relationship grew from being best friends to being married for 55-plus years.
As newlyweds (Rob was 22 and Andi, 21) the couple began grad school together at the University of Washington in Seattle. Sailing was relegated to something Rob only dreamed about. "In our first year, we both studied hard and lived on very little money," Rob said. "I stayed away from sailing because I knew it was a huge distraction; it certainly cost me a grade point or so in college." But during the couple's six years in the Seattle area, the sailing bug kept biting at Rob. With Andi's encouragement, he started sailing an OK dinghy as the two pursued their studies: Andi got her master's in Romance languages and linguistics while Rob got a PhD in mathematics, and took a job at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in Sheboygan as a professor. The Overtons daughter Lisa was born shortly thereafter. About three years into their life in Sheboygan, Rob got itchy to sail again. And this time, Andi was keen to sail, too. They began looking for a suitable boat. There was a then little-known company in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, named Vanguard, owned by the then little-known Harken brothers. "They built every Olympic Class except the Tornado, and one of their boats was a 470, which we had never heard of," Rob said. "We thought it looked like a neat little boat for two people our age." Andi had never raced a sailboat, but she quickly learned to trapeze on the 470. They spent the first summer mainly swimming. "We capsized over
Andi Overton gets the hang of the 470's trapeze somewhere in Wisconsin in the 1970s.
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and over again, and raced the boat a few times with no success," Andi laughed. "But by the second year, we were at least keeping the boat upright and started moving up in the fleet." T he Over tons improved enough to qualify for the Olympic trials in 1976, which consumed their life for some three years. About the same time, Lisa became cognizant that her life was somewhat different from her schoolmates. Every weekend, the family loaded into a van pulling a trailer and headed off to a regatta, where someone would babysit for Lisa. While she hung around onshore, her parents raced. "I didn't even know the difference between playing on a boat and sailing. I used to joke that other kids had jungle gyms and I had the trapeze on a 470," Lisa said. Rob eventually took a job in Tidewater, near the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area. The 470 didn't exist there, and Rob gravitated toward Lasers, which he raced every weekend while Andi did race committee work. In 1983, Lisa was 13 and doing well academically, but not so well socially because most of her classmates were a year or two older. Rob and Andi's solution was to quit their jobs and take Lisa to Europe. They sold their house to buy Mehitabel, a 41-ft Rival, and sailed from Mallorca to Gibraltar, south to the Canary Islands and across to Barbados, spending a winter in the Caribbean before sailing back to Virginia Beach, where they sold the boat. It was a formative year for the Overtons, particularly Lisa. "I was about to go to high school, but instead was on a boat with my parents for an entire year with no friends, no TV, no radio and no internet," Lisa said. "But, it was a year where I learned to be interested in things in a way which I think teenagers don't often get. I learned to sail and to navigate by sextant and chart navigation. Early on, I bargained to exchange a watch for cooking duties — I got out of sitting behind that wheel
