We almost ran into the monster, whilst cruising on shallow seas through short steep waves. It was at a time when adventuring yachties and readers of the novel 'Moby Dick' still believed that whales were angry monsters that would attack and smash a boat to pieces and around the time Sikaflex was invented . It happened two years before Greenpeace launched its first anti-whaling campaign and it was still four years until the National Geographic would publish and introduce the world to the plight and ‘ Songs of the Humpback Whale’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WOjJIynHgM The north-west-coast of New Zealand was poorly charted back then, maybe it still is. Our charts were notarized with comments from early explorers warning of shallow seas and shifting sandy bottoms. The Admiralty Pilot Books which we carried also had little information. It was a time when most cruising yachties still navigated with paper charts, Walker-Logs and sextants in wooden boats fastened with copper na...

Ann Britton, a yachtswoman of the 60s and 70s was a figure who like many women of her time lived in a world where a man’s story was worth telling but a woman’s story went untold or was scoffed at. A world and a time when the media, and sailing clubs were run by beer swilling, Penthouse reading, cigar-smoking men. I want to tell her story, or at least what little I know of Ann Britton, yachtswoman.  Ann’s story, as first woman to skipper her yacht around the world stands alongside famous yachting figures such as Sir Robin Knox-Johnston (first solo nonstop) and Sir Francis Chichester who had their circumnavigations made famous. Whilst at the very same time she was circumnavigating, Ann’s story was relegated to a series of articles, “Dolly on Deck” in yachting magazines. Stories about men of valor and their adventures, whilst yachtswoman where what? Dolly deckhands? She wrote those articles I suppose, but it w...

Chapter 2.         Eye of the Storm              “She’s free, she’s free.” The yacht’s chain had gone slack. As Valhalla slipped off the back of the wave the chain pulled taught and with a tremendous twang, snapped! My reflex was to ram the throttle forward hard. Miraculously the fourteen-inch prop pushed her bow ahead through the next wave which thankfully broke behind us. We were free from our anchorage, and I steered her to a north-east compass bearing into rough but deep water, leaving our anchor and fifty fathoms of chain behind. I’d sometimes though of putting a folding prop on her and now I thanked Neptune that I hadn’t. The sky was getting lighter, the seas were short and sharp and if I think back on it, the wind was probably blowing at least twenty knots as the crew began busying themselves around the deck to quickly set some sails, to steady her and get us away from the island. First ...