My t-shirt, felt soaked to my underpants. The warm tropical rain was beating almost horizontally into my face and had soaked through the toweling, tucked under the collar of my hooded sailing jacket. It was just after 4am in the morning and the night was pitch black on deck. I’d been awakened an hour earlier by the thumping of Valhalla’s lead keel against coral heads. We had made landfall late, the afternoon before, on our fifth day of a slow uneventful sailing leg from Auckland, NZ. When we encountered what I can only describe as eerie weather conditions. The sea was relatively calm, but most of the afternoon we had battled sudden squalls, very unusual for way out in the Pacific. No sooner would we get all the canvas up and we’d be pulling it down again. Small banks of clouds would suddenly appear in the clear azure sky and rush towards us, hammering us with the squalls they carried in their bellies. But not just from one direction, they came at us from different directions, a

  We were now sailing 2,300 km North of Auckland, New Zealand, making good daily distances around the North of the Tongan archipelago, somewhere South-West of Tongatapu, a small group of islands that formed the Northern most islands of The Kingdom of Tonga.   I awoke to the mainsail and genoa flogging. It sounded like Valhalla had become becalmed. I rolled out of my bunk, tired after a disturbing night of tacking into north-easterlies with the north-westerly ocean-set catching us side on and pushing us west. We had set out from Fiji and were heading for Apia, Western Samoa. I climbed up the gangway, into the cockpit and rubbed my eyes, the horizon was just visible, dawn was not quite breaking. Graham had deserted his watch and gone below and was fast asleep and Howie was asleep at the helm. I grabbed the wheel and brought the ketch to a point where the light breeze caught the main, she healed slightly to starboard and the flogging stopped. “Any sight of land?” I asked the yawning helms

““Nico” my Mother screamed as my Father tossed me off the back of a small sailing skiff, (not unlike the one below) into the freezing water of Spaarndam. That was my earliest memory of boats. It was 1951, not long after the war, life was probably less precious in Holland in those days than it is today. I was five years old, with the end of a rope tied around my tiny waist. I sometimes wonder why such a frightening memory, such a rude introduction to sailing, was the start of my lifetime obsession with boats.”   I guess that my fascination with boats also has something to do with my Mother’s genetics and not my Father’s idiotic compulsion, to teach me how to swim. Not that seafaring is unusual for any Dutchman. About half the country lays below sea level and Holland was once one of the great seafaring nations, the Dutch charting the oceans of the world.   Z eeman , was my mother’s maiden-name, translated from Dutch, it m