Project Manager Age: 27 from Wellington
Volleyball pro and teacher Age: 26 From New Plymouth
Marketing & fitness guru Age: 26 from Queenstown
Farmer & father Age: 32 from Southbridge
Works for the IRD Age:29 from Dunedin
THE SHIP
Name: M.V. Lida
Location: Built in Holland, registered to Antigua and Barbuda
Usual cargo: General cargoes, dry goods
Gross Tonnage: 992 RT
Length: 62.8m
Breadth: 10.7m
Main Engine: Caterpillar 3512
Main Engine Power: 1210 HP
Loaded Trade Speed: 10.6 kn / 3.8 mt (in good weather).
It all began with a good Kiwi boy who left his small kiwi home town and headed off to London on his OE…And it was all good, except he was lost without his mates, his local brew, and his local. It’s just so English over in England!
So he wrote to us at Speight’s and told us he was missing his tri-star. We figured he probably wasn’t the only one, so we asked some more Kiwi guys in the UK if they missed their Speight’s too.
More then 500 of them wrote back to us and one of them was Tim Ellingham from Dannevirke. He wrote:
“After leaving NZ and my job on the family farm over 8 months ago, and heading for the big city of London, it has been tough. Not only have I traded in the fresh air, open spaces and the sunshine of home for a dirty old office job, I’ve also had to forego the sheer joy of a cold Speight’s after a hard days’ work. Granted, a hard day’s slog now only involves being stuck on a jam-packed tube for an hour each way (reason enough to knock back a few Speight's…), and working on my “computer tan” whilst playing with numbers in spreadsheets all day. It’s not like at home, where a hard days’ work would be a day of fencing, crutching or mustering on the farm. But still a Speight’s after a “pretend” London work day would really hit the spot and make me miss home just that wee bit less……..”
We thought “he’s a good buggar,” so we sent him some Speight’s to enjoy. Then we thought about it some more and decided that a couple of cases for Tim and a few others just wasn’t enough. There were still hundreds of guys out there missing their Gold Medal Ale…
That’s when someone piped up… “what the hell, lets take a whole Speight’s Ale House to London”. So we gave Tim’s mate James Livingston a call and asked him if he’d take a pub to London for his mate. He didn’t even think about it.
Thing is, James needed a few more Speight’s mates to take the journey with him. 70 days through Samoa, Panama, the Bahamas and New York would be tough on his own. So after a rigorous selection process, James & the Speight's team have chosen 4 keen blokes to help out.
These four mates will take a piece of New Zealand – a surprisingly big piece – across the world by ship. It’s logical lunacy that will attain mythical status as it’s told and retold in pubs around the world for years to come.
hey speights thanks for the add im super speights girl by the way see in my picture ( its from newyears i went around provideing everyone with speights) it was my mission to hav a speights drinker in every tent :P i completed my mission and had the best newyears ever thanks to speights :) thanks guys xxx
