If you enjoyed The Voyage of The Aegre, I think you’ll like Di Beach’s story, The Ocean Voyager and Me.
The stories share an underlying similarity, but their telling is oh, so different. Fundamentally because each is told from the perspective of the other sailing partner. So, if you want an inkling of how Julie might have told The Aegre story, this is it.
Di Beach and her ‘Ocean Voyager’ went to sea a few years before Julie and I aboard The Aegre, but essentially at a similar time, the late sixties and early seventies. A time when building and fitting out a boat and heading off across oceans with relatively little experience was on a par with driving from London to Sydney or a woman cycling alone from Ireland to India. A time when kids walked to school by themselves, and Robin Knox-Johnston was the only finisher in the Golden Globe Race in a heavy, slow boat he’d had built of teak in Mumbai.
Di met Rod, her future husband, ‘the ocean voyager’, in Alderney in the Channel Islands, when she was 17 and off with her girlfriend for their first unchaperoned summer holiday, working in a local guest house. Rod (22) and some student friends had sailed there from Southend in an open 22’ flat-bottomed, centre boarder intended for taking sightseers for a spin on the Thames Estuary. To Di, smitten with Rod, it looked like fun to sail back across the Channel to England with him and his friends, although stowing the suitcases was going to be tricky. Well, it was 1967. It’s what you did.
One thing led to another. Their relationship rapidly developed. Rod and the boys studied architecture and then got their first jobs in… Uganda, as junior architects working on a showcase hotel for President Obote.
Di finished her Business Studies course at Oxford Polytechnic, but she had glimpsed an alternative future with Rod, and despite strong parental objections, flew to Africa to marry him.
Well, I won’t try to tell you the story, but suffice to say, Rod, the consummate sailor, became enamoured with the local boats built in Lamu, Kenya, and came up with the idea of having one built and then sailing it back to England with Di and his friends when their contracts ended.
Plans were sketched in the sand for a 42 ft gaff cutter, and local boat builders were persuaded to take on this most unusual commission. Despite the to-be-expected difficulties, a year later they all sailed away, but not taking the direct route – there is no direct route from Uganda to Falmouth.
They made it too, via South America, well, most of them, plus two children, one born along the way.
If Rod had written the story, it would have been all about the design, the technical aspects of the building and the sailing of the boat. But Di wrote it, and we get a different perspective; she notices, remembers, and writes about aspects that Rod perhaps never gave a thought to.
Just as Julie might have done had she written the story of The Aegre voyage.
I loved it.
The Ocean Voyager and Me by Di Beach. Published 2014. ISBN 978-1496097545
Available on Amazon
