How many letter are there in our team song? What animal is the Singha? What is the ‘Advanced Streun Maneuver’? These – and similarly challenging questions – featured in our Navy Quiz, one of the highlights of our annual Navy White Christmas party.

The Xmas party itself is of course the highlight on the Navy’s social calendar – giving our Sailors an excuse to wear their finest white uniforms for a good cause: raising funds for the Hong Kong Sea School. The Sea School – despite its prime waterfront location in Stanley – is a boarding school for underprivileged boys and relies substantially on donations for its funding. Given the close proximity to our main training and racing base in Stanley, the Navy maintains a long friendship with the school.

Aside from the Navy Quiz, where Sailors were fined for providing the wrong answers (“What is the Red Bull ingredient ‘taurine’?”), we also changed the format of our Navy Auction to raise additional cash. Each Sailors was required to come up with an auctionable item or service and failure to do so resulted in a default penalty (i.e. donation) of $1000. While some opted for the default option, the majority of Sailors showed their creative side and came up with interesting – and judging from the fierce bidding – desirable ideas. Framed pictures, vintage shirts and other Navy memorabilia were the more obvious choices, but there were many others like a dinner for six at CFO Fred’s home (including unlimited access to his vast wine cellar!), an offer to be Chief MeMe (Media Mechanic) Martin’s main photographic subject for the entire 2014 season or the offer to shave Sailor Mike’s beard. The latter was one of the less desired items and only fetched $300 and we have yet to see a picture of the shaven Sailor Mike. There were also two fine Indian Liechten-pashmina scarves up for grabs and a case of fine Liechtenstein brut. All in all, the auction raised over HKD 30,000 itself.

After the party in our private location we, as always, ventured into the streets of LKF to coax more money out of passers-by. And while that part of the mission seems to get harder every year (why do people keep thinking that we would go through all this trouble of dressing up in white to keep the money for ourselves?) the donation box still filled up nicely. Showing up in Navy Whites however also seems to be an increasing security risk, as POFC Ruedi and Martin had their faces purposely drenched in beer while LCDR Beat was punched in the face – by a woman. We can only assume that they may have mistaken the Liechtenstein Princely Navy with another naval force whose intentions are sometimes less charitable than ours…

Despite these incidents it was a very successful night indeed and the generosity of our Sailors (and our main sponsor) resulted in a total of just a few dollars shy of HKD 100,000 raised for the Sea School. A fantastic result – thanks and congratulations to all!

Visit our facebook page for more pictures.