Zoonie Sails Home: A phlegmatic odyssey

From 191-year-old tortoises to ‘Vicky the Volvo,’ Dick Durham reviews a circumnavigation tale that’s as winsome as it is eccentric

I’ve often wondered why people give names to inanimate objects, why they feel the need to christen cold steel, personalise plastic or anthropomorphise auxiliaries. Perhaps it’s superstition – a belief that bestowing technology with a chummy moniker to be ‘inclusive’ might appease fate and help ensure it doesn’t come back to bite you.

In these days of all-enveloping Artificial Intelligence, unsure whether a bot or a being is providing us with critical information, we can be forgiven for falling back on the Druidistic ritual of ‘touching wood,’ but that’s no way of behaving towards the insentient.

This is painfully exemplified in ocean yachtswoman Barbara White’s self-published book Zoonie Sails Home.

She and hubby Rob’s totemic naming ceremonies aboard their Oyster 406 did nothing to prevent the failure of a skin fitting and the boat’s near sinking in Whangarei, near New Zealand’s capital Auckland, to which valued crew member ‘Henry the Hydrovane’ had sailed them to in the first half of the couple’s circumnavigation.

They had left the boat for a seven-week camping holiday around South Island when, while sitting in ‘Vicky the Volvo,’ Barbara received a mobile phone call alerting her to the boat’s predicament.

After a lift-out and restoration, plus five oil changes to the engine, Zoonie was ready for sea, but disaster struck this remarkable couple again: Rob required a heart operation.

Delayed, but not discouraged, the pair set off for their ambitious indirect cruise back to their home in Dorset.

These are people who really know how to travel and at each location they head off into the hinterland to explore the country in depth. There they meet and befriend the natives, learn how to cook exotic dishes, and thanks to ‘Mr Google’, do their homework onboard before setting off in ‘Diva the dinghy.’

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The folksy way Barbara tells her tale is very English…that is to say phlegmatic, matter-of-fact, as though she’s addressing a reception class, and it’s all the more winsome for that.

Her travels include a collection of miscellany, worthy of a globe-trotting encyclopaedia, like the fact that St Helena has a tortoise – with a name, of course (Jonathan) – which, at 191 years old, lays claim to being the world’s oldest reptile, arriving on the island only 61 years after its most famous resident, Napoleon, died there.

On one camping trip, while on the west coast of Australia, these intrepid yachties drive up to Broome, hardly a destination most circumnavigators put on their ‘to-do’ list. On route, Barbara discovers that a giant mining company dynamited an Aboriginal cave system containing ancient wall art, to get at deposits of iron ore.

In Vanuatu, our unflinching guide discovers that penis sheaths are still in use among some residents, although cannibalism has become passé.

In Tasmania she finds that shipbuilding skills were kickstarted with ‘blackbirders’ – slave-masters – using their captives as labour.

And, following a walk in the African bush, while cruising around South Africa, Barbara is told that more elephants die from algae poisoning than from ivory hunters.

Here, with Zoonie moored in a Richards Bay marina and her crew suffering in the 39°C heat, Rob deploys: ‘a daddy fan for the saloon and a mummy fan for the aft cabin.’

I was amazed to learn that whaling only ended in the Azores in 1985, and was equally surprised it had lasted so long when the whalers themselves, while receiving a wage slightly better than a pocketful of whale’s teeth, which had originally been their sole remuneration, never received parity with the harpooner.

It’s in the Azores that they meet a hiking guide and photographer named, wait for it, ‘Mr Click.’

Barbara’s story began with A Tale of Two Yachts, in which the first half of the couple’s circumnavigation ended in 2017.

Her six-year circumnavigation will hopefully provide us winter-bound sailors with talks at yacht clubs around the coast.

I’ll happily come along and listen Barbara, but please, please, no more pet names!

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