The partnership between school-based mentors and university-based tutors plays an important part in the education of the next generation of teachers. This article shares the findings of a university’s research project seeking to understand both the barriers and enablers to school-based mentors’ professional development. Incidentally, this research project is also supporting the university-based teacher educators’ professional development. During the process, the group adopted seafaring metaphors to describe their work. These have been used throughout this article to assist with navigation. The findings of this research will be used in the further development of support for mentoring and tutoring within the initial teacher education partnership.