Kiwi mum's adventure - FROM AMERICA'S CUP TO AFRICA'S HERO!

An Auckland author tells how she’s changing lives in Uganda

- Cloe Willetts

Decked out in full wet-weather gear, her laptop wrapped in a rubbish bag on her lap, Auckland mum Emma Outteridge paddled in a dinghy across a canal near Buenos Aires, desperately hoping for an internet signal. The self-described “America’s Cup kid”, 38, needed to send off the final manuscript for her book, which she’d completed while living on a houseboat in Argentina with her Aussie husband Nathan, an Olympic gold medal-winning sailor.

“My dinghy was half-sinking because it was raining so hard and it’s definitely a scene that sticks with me,” laughs the author of Between Two Worlds, a new memoir about how she built a bridge between the international sailing community and a rural African village.

“It was a very momentous way to finish the final chapter after a rather epic journey.”

Being a published first-time author is a dream come true for Emma, who grew up watching her dad Ross Blackman work on America’s Cup campaigns, producing the sails and spinnakers that powered New Zealand Challenge in the late ’80s and early ’90s. She later went on to work for Louis Vuitton, running its international sailing hospitality programme, and rubbing shoulders with celebrities, athletes and billionaires.

“I’d always loved to write – in primary school, I was the kid doing a 50-page story rather than just half a page,” recalls Emma, mum to Jack, two, and Charlie, four months. “I travelled a lot through my 20s and I’d write these massive group emails to everyone I knew, with tales of my adventures. I always said I wanted to write a memoir and when I came to this small school for orphans in Uganda, I knew I’d found my story.”