I was born, and lived until I was five, in a landlocked state in India. No swimming – which probably accounts for my aversion to it as well as lack of ability – although, I have taken a mooring line that’s tied to a yacht and jumped into water to tie the boat up on rocks. But I always carry a ‘noodle’, a long piece of polyfoam which hitches under my armpits to keep me afloat. And Bob watches from the helm while he keeps the boat steady. I’m sure he would find a way to help me if I got into difficulties. He’d have to make the boat safe by which time I would surely drown – oh well, the sea is the final frontier after all.

           I am reading Sandra Clayton’s Dolphins Under my Bed in which she calls the sea ‘the final frontier’. It is the first in a series of books telling of her cruising adventures on a catamaran called Voyager with her husband David. This book follows their journey from England to the Mediterranean. Here is how Sandra explains why she started to write about their time on the sea:-

           ‘I found our experiences so new and captivating that the urge to write them down was irresistible. In addition, I knew that the many places we were visiting, often for a very short time, would quickly blur into a very few; which would be a pity because each was unique. And I knew that all the things that are happening to us would soon become a jumble, and could envisage a future time in which we would be unable to agree about what happened where and when and how and to which one of us, because memory is so fallible. And I feared that, with advancing age, memory might fail us altogether …’

         Enough said.

         So, in similar vein, here are Bob and I on Sailing Yacht Peperuka. The boat was built in South Africa, her name is the name of a wind in the language of Swahili. She was built in 2002 and sailed to the Mediterranean by her previous owner.

           This is Bob’s second summer season in the marina at Kalamata, Greece. Last year he arrived during the third week of July and sailed north around the Ionian waters with friends. I was awaiting publication of my book, Finding Takri and we had recently moved into a new house so I came in September to help put Peperuka on the hard for the winter.

         When we arrived in Kalamata on 29th April this year; the preparations for her summer season began.