I sailed from Bali to Singapore in August of 1981 and left for Aden in January 1982 on a 4,000 mile passage that is as far as I know still the longest open passage ever.
There were then many Vietnamese refugees in Singapore who had left their country in small boats because they did not want to live under the Communist government. Some of them were eventually relocated to the United States.
I deliberately did not use place names in SHADOWS. It is a work of fiction and I wanted it to be vague. But it is not difficult to figure out that the city was Singapore. The boat people Vietnamese. And the island in the Malacca Strait.
Reading Part Three of SHADOWS caused Andy Solywoda to send me a link about an experience with boat people his brother, Barry, an honorable man, had in those waters in 1988. Although the article says ‘Pacific Ocean’ I expect that is incorrect and that they were west of the Philippines.
https://archives.starbulletin.com/2008/08/28/news/story01.html
Google informs me when my name appears on the Internet. Not always with complete accuracy. But I just received a link to a current CRUISING WORLD article about sailing comfort ratios. Here is the link:
The formula was devised by the naval architect, Ted Brewer.
It is said, “That high numbers represent joy and peace with the ocean.”
A key paragraph compares a few circumnavigators and their boats. I quote:
‘Robin Lee Graham began his circumnavigation when he was 16 years old, long before electronic navigation. Most of his voyage was on a Lapworth 24. Comfort ratio 21.6. Laura Dekker is the youngest human to sail around the world solo. She did so in a Jeanneau Gin Fiz 37, the same model that John Kretschmer crossed the Atlantic twice on. Comfort ratio 25.9. Webb Chiles completed his sixth solo circumnavigation in a Moore 24. Comfort ratio 10.3.”
The article was written by a man who sails an S&S 47 with a comfort ration of 35.5.
GANNET and I were on the extreme end of the curve in that as many other ways. But, as I did not ever think of my age when making the GANNET circumnavigation, I did not have a problem with comfort. I enjoyed solving the problem of how to live for six or seven months and passages of thousands of miles in the small, quick boat; but I have always chosen sailing ability in a boat over comfort, and have long known that it is easier and less expensive to modify yourself than your boat. And I strongly disagree that anyone in a boat with a much higher ‘comfort level’ knew greater joy and peace with the ocean than did I.
I wonder what the comfort ratio would be for CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE. Are minus numbers possible?
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