Our boat Wavewalker, a 23 metre, 30-ton wooden-hulledbeauty, had been professionally built, and we had spent months fitting it out and testing it in the roughest weather we could find.
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The Start of the Journey
In July 1976, the author, his wife Mary, son Jonathan, 6 and daughter Suzanne,7, set sail from Plymouth, England, to duplicate the round-the-world voyage made 200 years earlier by Captain James Cook.
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The Shipwreck
“Take the wheel”, I shouted as I scrambled for the hatch.Larry and Herb were pumping like madmen. Broken timbershung at crazy angles, the whole starboard side bulged inwards;clothes, crockery, charts, tins and toys sloshed about in deep water.
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Dawn of January 2nd
The wind has dropped tremendously
Oh look there's a huge cloud towered aft of the ship!
At dawn on January 2, the waves were gigantic.Despite atrocious weather, we had a wonderful holiday complete with a Christmas tree. New Year’s Day saw no improvement in the weather, but we reasoned that it had to change soon. And it did change — for the worse.
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January 3rd - 4p.m
“we aren’t afraid of dying if we can all be together
funny people
I checked our charts and calculated that there weretwo small islands a few hundred kilometres to the east. One ofthem, Ile Amsterdam, was a French scientific base. Our onlyhope was to reach these pinpricks in the vast ocean. But unlessthe wind and seas abated so we could hoist sail, our chanceswould be slim indeed.
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Ile Amsterdam
I rushed on deck and gazed with relief at the stark outline ofIle Amsterdam. It was only a bleak piece of volcanic rock, withlittle vegetation — the most beautiful island in the world!