Douglas Robertson

They had an 80-acre farm with no children.

He said to me, Douglas, you don't need to sail around the world with your family.

He says, that's madness.

He says, you stay here with me and Emmy, and I'll adopt you, and you can have the farm.

I'll leave you the farm.

yeah wow and i think back to it and i remember saying to him no john i want to go around the world so somehow i'd switched from thinking i was going to be a farmer to hankering after that adventurous lifestyle you know yeah so douglas has done away with his thoughts of becoming a farmer and now had his sights firmly set on adventure an adventure of course that came with a lot of risk

Yeah, it's risk management, isn't it?

I mean, to use modern business, you know, back in those days, we said things like that.

But my dad, it was always very convincing, even when he was wrong sometimes, said, the best lifeboat is the boat we're on.

The yacht, Lucette, is the best lifeboat.

We'll just send a radio message and wait for rescue.

if something goes wrong.

And we believed him, you know?

And he was to rue saying those words much later, but we weren't to know any better than that time.

Yeah, we did.

We talked about the risks.

I mean, the risks made it more exciting in a way, didn't they?

You know, life on a farm, whilst it's great, a great life for kids, is extremely mundane for farmers.

You know, you're a slave to the cows, you're a slave to the seasons, you're a slave to the weather.

In lots of ways, Dougal had had enough.