Tomorrow afternoon (Saturday) on Channel Seven’s Creek To Coast, having gotten amongst the mahi mahi off Mooloolaba and turned it into ceviche in front of our very eyes, Sunshine Beach’s Sally Jenyns will hang up the rod and the filleting knife for the last time – at least for the cameras.
The popular TV chef is retiring after spending almost half her life in her dream job – catching fish and cooking them for the cameras of Queensland lifestyle shows like Creek To Coast, Great South East, Queensland Weekender and, back in the day, Brownie’s Coastwatch.
In fact, the title of her bestselling first cookbook, Fishing and Feasting, pretty much sums it up.
Not that at 55 she’ll be giving up those activities in real life, just making more time to relax and feel the sand between her toes.
Sally had salt in her veins right from the start, spending an idyllic Brisbane childhood with four brothers exploring Moreton Bay on her father Ron’s classic 73-foot wooden yacht South Pacific 2.
And it helped that Ron was a three-times Olympian and 11-times Australian champion sailor in the demanding Finn class.
With her mother also from a sailing background, as Sally says, “What choice did we have?”
The timing of her completion of a hospitality management diploma couldn’t have been more fortuitous. Ron Jenyns had just retired from the 90-year-old family business House of Jenyns (a leading brand in corsets and undergarments) to focus on a yacht charter business, and Brisbane’s World Expo 88 was about to begin.
Sally set up her own business called Ship To Shore Catering to service the many party cruises on the river then, when Expo finished, she joined Ron on the South Pacific 2 up on the Barrier Reef where it was chartered as a mothership for the game fishing season.
Thus began an eight-year dream run for a young girl who was likeable and fun, knew boats backwards and could really cook.
She says: “Game season on the Reef was a mecca for the top fishermen, so I started getting offered work on luxury boats around the world. One job always led to several more, and I went from the USA to the Mediterranean, the Bahamas and Brazil. In 1990 I crossed the Pacific from Cairns to Mexico, spending five months in Tahiti en route. It was just bliss.”
The blokey world of the mega-rich game fishermen never bothered her.
“One of the great things about it was that as a young woman I always had a group of blokes to go out with, and I always felt safe. The other great thing was going to these amazing markets in remote places and provisioning the boat with incredible food.
“I made friends with so many people from all over the world, but I never wanted to get married and raise kids in another country. I always wanted to do that in Australia, and I did. And I found a good one!”
In another cycle of good fortune, Sally met builder Mark Billy Bain soon after deciding to settle in Noosa, buying a little apartment and landing her first TV job.
Oh, and she also published her first book, a kids’ title called My Funky Fishing Book in the same year. And of course, it sold like stink.
Sally recalls: “Out of the blue I got a phone call from a guy called Ken Brown who had been producing and hosting a fishing and surfing show called Brownie’s Coastwatch for Seven for a few years. He’d had a cooking segment with Andy Phipps [a Noosa chef and fisherman] but Phippsy had been poached by the Nine Network. After running without a cooking segment for a while, Brownie thought I might be worth a try.”
The relaxed format of Coastwatch fit Sally’s easygoing style and she was a popular addition to the team.
As it happened, Phippsy co-published a seafood cookbook with Nine and, not to be outdone, Brownie persuaded Seven to partner in Sally’s first cookbook, Fishing and Feasting, followed within the year by The Coastwatch Cookbook. Needless to say, they too sold well.
Around this time Australia was becoming besotted with English celebrity chef Rick Stein whose first series was playing on television.
Sally was no exception. She couldn’t get enough of his seafood recipes, delivered in a calm, casual manner.
“How I met Rick Stein is a story of complete fan girl behaviour.
“My mum’s brother lived in Cornwall, so when Mum and my stepdad were going over to visit, I’d just published Fishing and Feasting, and when Mum told me they were planning a special night at Rick’s seafood restaurant in Padstow, I asked her to take a signed copy of my book to give him.
“He wasn’t there but she explained who I was and left the copy. Sometime later I got a copy of his book in the mail with a note thanking me.
“But the next year my show got contacted by the BBC who said that Rick was coming out to shoot for Seafood Odyssey, a series where he reflected on all the great places he’d been, and Noosa was one of them.
“They’d heard that the show’s chef lived in Noosa and wanted to put us together for a segment. We ended up shooting for two days for Odyssey, which was just bliss, and it still plays today from time to time.”
Late in the ‘90s Seven decided their local lifestyle programming needed a revamp and Coastwatch morphed into Creek To Coast, with Sally one of its first hires. As it happened, Rick Stein was touring Australia promoting Seafood Odyssey, so she proved her value by securing him for a segment on the new show.
In 2000 Sally married Mark Bain, by now a fast-rising Noosa-based builder/developer. “He was a builder with a lot of ambition, brave, doesn’t mind taking a risk. I admire that about him so much.”
Mark had a daughter, Jay, from a previous marriage and the couple soon added sons Matt and Tim, born two years apart. Jay has now blessed them with a granddaughter while Matt and Tim, both rising surf stars with the Noosa Boardriders Club, are entering the building trades as they leave school.
Mark and Sally’s business successes have served them well, and the family lives in a large, comfortable house with panoramic ocean views, oddly enough, just along the Sunshine dunes from the home of the Dowd family, founders of the other great Australian undergarment brand, Hickory.
Sally’s farewell on Creek To Coast promises to be a hoot.
“The show’s host Scotty Hillier and I went out fishing off Mooloolaba just recently. We’d been trying to do it since I resigned in September but the weather kept stopping us. It was what they wanted to do for my last shoot because it was how the whole thing started, and they’ve dug into the archives and found a lot of embarrassing blooper stuff to mix up with our fishing trip.
“It was a great way to finish, and at the end of the day the skipper, who is also a chef, did a little ceviche and fed us, rather than me having to do it.”
Sal’s guilty secret?
She’s learning how to play golf for her golden years. Given the success she’s had at everything else she’s turned her hand to, look out, divot diggers!
