Andy Bryce, who had originally commissioned the building of The Aegre in Scotland, and I, kept in touch over the years. Then, jumping forward to 2005, we met again.
I was back in Scotland after a year long circumnavigation with John and Marie-Christine Ridgway aboard their 58 ft ketch, English Rose VI, and before returning to Australia went to Scrabster, to meet with Andy and his wife Elizabeth in the pub by the harbour.
It was 33 years since that fateful day in July 1972 when Julie and I had last been in Scrabster, and found The Aegre rocking gently below the harbour wall.
In 2005 the small yachts moored below the harbour wall looked just as they had all those years ago, but now there was no little Shetland boat gently rocking, her varnished topsides glinting in the sun as if to say ‘Come sail me’.
Back then Andy took us out for a sail aboard The Aegre, and totally captivated, we’d bought her on the spot.
Of course neither Andy nor we ever imagined then that one day we would sail her across the Atlantic and and much of the Pacific.
But The Aegre had the heritage of a Shetland boat, fined down over centuries to serve in the stormy waters of the North Sea between Shetland and Norway. Andy Bryce makes light of her early sailing adventures across the Pentland Firth and around the southern isles of Orkney, where there’s merely a gale blowing on a good day. Sure he read the weather carefully, but these aren’t sailing waters for the fearful or a poorly found boat.
Now over a pint, Andy promised to write the story of The Aegre‘s early years, ‘For the book’,
Way back, during our Atlantic and Pacific passages, Andy had assiduously followed the adventures of The Aegre. But now, following our meeting in Scrabster, he and Elizabeth decided to take a passage on a cargo ship in late 2005 that broadly followed the course of The Aegre across the Atlantic, and Pacific, even to Tahiti and Samoa where our voyage concluded. I imagined him standing on the bridge of the cargo ship looking out to the horizon, mid-ocean, wondering what it must have been like out here alone on his little Aegre.
In December 2005 their ship reached Melbourne, Australia, and we had a grand get-together, and he delivered to me his story of The Aegre’s early years that I’ve reproduced on other webpages. Sadly, ‘the book’ wasn’t written then for me to give him a copy. A pity; I think he’d have loved it. But now it has been written and his memory lives on. A fine sailor. His daughter has a copy.
Next: More about Shetland Boats
For the whole story, read the book ‘The Voyage of The Aegre‘
