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Chapter 1: What challenges did the Robertson family face at sea?
Before you ever see land disappearing, the ocean makes one thing clear. It doesn't care who you are. It is vast beyond comprehension, covering more than 70% of the planet, driven by currents that move with the force of continents, and weather systems that conform, grow, and turn lethal in a matter of hours. Waves can rise higher than houses. Winds can tear rigging apart.
Storms can arrive without warning and leave nothing behind but wreckage and silence. Out here, there's no pause button. The sea has always demanded respect because it punishes arrogance and inexperience without hesitation. Navigation errors can mean days, sometimes weeks off course. A broken mast, a failed engine or a misjudged crossing can be the difference between survival and disappearance.
In the 1970s, there was no GPS, no satellite weather tracking, no emergency beacons, the push of a button. Once you sailed beyond the horizon, you were pretty much on your own. And yet for centuries, people have been drawn to it. That promise of freedom, the romance of distance and the idea that if you keep moving forward long enough, the world will eventually open itself to you.
And for one British family, that pull was strong enough to outweigh the fear. They had just left everything they knew behind. and were about to place their lives in the hands of wind, weather and water. For most of them, this would be their first true encounter with the open ocean. Its power, its unpredictability, its capacity to be both breathtaking and utterly brutal.
From being a farmer's son who had very little knowledge about boats and sailing, I was thrust into the deep end and trying to steer this boat in extremely severe weather under sail, which is more difficult than motor, in an open cockpit. And it was extremely rough. It was a rough initiation that anybody could get, you know.
What lay ahead was equal parts excitement and terror. Because what they were attempting in their day was something few families had ever done, and almost none had done without experience. They were stepping into one of the most unforgiving environments on earth. What lay ahead felt like adventure. But the ocean does not announce when it plans to change the rules.
And once it does, well, there's no turning back.
I'm looking at the moon in the sky It shouldn't come as a surprise but I can't sleep War in my mind I'm trying to fight a war in my mind I don't know who's the winner tonight, but it ain't me.
Chapter 4 Thank you, Dad. Thank you, Dougal. And am I right in saying almost instantly as you set sail, you hit a storm pretty quickly?
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Chapter 2: How did the family adapt to life aboard the Lucette?
Thank you, Dad. Thank you, Dougal. Thank you for doing that. Changed our lives. Changed everybody's lives. We didn't have a lot of money. We'd run out of money. And we worked. We got money. And we financed the trip through yacht deliveries and gardening and painting. We sailed up through the Caribbean. We touched on a lot of islands. We sailed across the Atlantic up through the Caribbean.
Ended up in Miami. I went to Miami, met lots of very interesting people there. I loved America. In fact, I couldn't believe we were leaving. When Dougal announced that we were leaving, I thought we'd settled in America, you know what I mean? I found it really difficult, a real rip to leave America. But we did. We carried on our journey. Jamaica, the Semblance Islands, fantastic.
Through the Panama Canal to the Galapagos Islands, fantastic. And to come was the longest leg of the voyage.
At the time, they may not have been 100% sure which way they would go, but what they did know was that their goal was to head to New Zealand and then onto the white sandy beaches of Australia. And from Australia, it would be time to steer the ship back towards home. Going via Egypt, where they'd take the boat out of the water and truck it to the Mediterranean and sail back towards the UK.
So that was sort of penciled in as the last leg of the voyage, so to speak. And we thought it would take us three years. You know, we'd sort of estimated then we're going to get to Australia. But for now, we were leaving the Galapagos and we were sailing to the Marquesas Islands, which are on the other side of the Pacific.
At this stage, I'm assuming there's no trepidation about sailing anymore. There's no, you know, you just choose a route and say, oh, this will be a fun one. We'll do this and away we go. And there was, you know, any fears of issues I would imagine has sort of subsided and you were just enjoying the trip.
Yeah, there were none at all. I mean, the way yachtsmen work is you go to a port and there are other yachtsmen there. And you ask them where they're going and where they've been. And, you know, there's lots of talk about, yeah, that place is safe. This is a good anchorage. That's worth seeing. If you're going that way, don't leave out that place. You know what I mean? That's well worth seeing.
And that's how we learned where to go to, you know. Everybody, there was quite a number of people doing some kind of a voyage, you know. Not many doing well, in actual fact, by the time we got to Panama. There were very few people that were contemplating crossing the Pacific.
But when we got to the Galapagos Islands, there were four or five yachts there waiting to go across the Pacific to the Marquesas or other islands on the other side. You could go across the Marquesas or you could go down to Tahiti and then go to Australia and New Zealand that way. There were sort of two routes that you could take. The easiest one was Marquesas.
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