Writing about the voyage of The Aegre has been hanging over me for nearly fifty years. At the time it was just a sailing adventure for Julie and I. Our purpose was to sail the oceans, to live life to the full. A book or any sort of fame, or record breaking was never part of the plan. The Aegre was just a little 21 ft Shetland boat that Julie and I sailed from NW Scotland across the Atlantic and much of the Pacific in 1973-4. Since the voyage, there has been periodic talk of a book but it never came to anything.
Much has changed in ocean sailing for small vessels since those days, most significant perhaps is the advent of GPS, removing the astro-navigation requirement barrier and the internet and global access to it via satellites, enabling near instant communication from any vessel anywhere to supporters, family and friends. Without either of these we aboard The Aegre, and all the other small boat voyagers or the time, had to just rely on ourselves, our preparation, and our initiative.
But the further the voyage slips into the past, the more remarkable it seems by today’s standards. Sometimes I wonder if we ever really did it.
I was starting to worry that the memory of those days would slowly slip into the greyness that old memories fade to. And worse, that the experience and the learning would not be shared.
But it was a visit to a beachside playground in 2019 with my wife Tomoko and our young granddaughters, Maggie and Rania, that finally stirred me into writing.
In front of us in the playground, Maggie and Rania jumped, fell over, squealed, and climbed. Maggie performed her latest trick on the bars while Rania ran to me for a cuddle, her small strong body nestling in the crook of my arm as she snuggled into my shoulder, out of the wind.
I looked over at Tomoko, “You know one day they will wonder how we ever got together, from opposite sides of the world, and how we ended up in Australia’.
Tomoko just gently smiled. After nearly forty years together, I know she thinks it was our destiny. Maybe it was. I looked up and out to sea. The sky was clear, and the wind freshening out of the southwest. The tops of the bigger waves were breaking. When the tide turned in a few hours, it would make for a nasty sea. But the horizon was clear. Sometimes it’s as if I’m looking back all those years.
Half an hour later, we were back in our comfortable home in a Melbourne beachside suburb. Opening a cupboard, I surveyed a collection of boxes and files, the hard copy memories of an earlier life cruising the Atlantic and Pacific in a little sailing boat, which led to both happiness and sadness, and somehow to Tomoko, two daughters and two granddaughters. The hard copy was there in front of me, but the soft copy, the story of how we became the people we are today, was in my head. And that’s the real story I wanted to tell.
It was time. I started writing.
Nicholas Grainger, Melbourne, Australia, 2019
See the book for the whole story.
