Will Oxley

But I managed to get, we had a handheld GPS, which was an unusual thing in those days.

And I managed to get a signal on that every now and again when I took it outside.

And so I had a paper chart, which somehow was dry.

I'm not quite sure how.

But I knew the coast pretty well and I knew where Eden was.

So I was just able to do it by largely dead reckoning.

But unfortunately, every now and again, an over-enthusiastic steerer would say, oh, we should head for Eden now.

So they would point the boat towards Eden.

And then, of course, one of these huge waves would crash over us and the boat would nearly tip over again.

And on one of the occasions that happened, the wave was so big that it pushed out all of the windows on the side of the boat and several tonnes of water.

rushed into the boat as it, as it continued to sort of destroy itself around us.

So we, we hammered bits of timber in and we stuck sails in the hole and, and we managed to get

quite close to Eden.

And I remember it was in the, this was in 98.

So people had mobile phones and they just changed over to digital.

And so we had all these mobile phones on the boat.

So I'm reaching out the hatch, trying not to get them wet, trying to get a signal.

And one guy, one of the Luddites on board, John Bird, he had hung on to his analog phone.

Thank goodness.

And the analog phone had a much better signal.