There was a time in the 1970s when daydreams of escape from suburban Britain seemed often to drift towards intrepid sea voyages. Thor Heyerdahl’s televised rafting adventures had something to do with it, and Francis Chichester’s fabled circumnavigation; those adventures stirred a salty restlessness in a generation of men who had grown up with the war stories of fathers and grandfathers and felt the need, in midlife, for tales of their own. One such individual was Maurice Bailey, a hot-metal typesetter from Derby. Bailey, a shy and awkward man, survivor of a miserable childhood, found love for the first time at 30, when he married Maralyn Harrison in 1963. Nearly a decade later, at a time when Britain had elected a yachtsman, Ted Heath, as prime minister, the Baileys abandoned their bungalow and their camping holidays in the Lake District and set out together on a sailing boat to New Zealand.
The Baileys’ voyage was not a whim. They had spent the previous five years building and kitting out their boat, which they called Auralyn, an amalgam of their names, the nearest thing they could imagine to parenthood. Maurice was an old-school hobbyist, who believed a serious seaman should leave as little as possible to chance. He taught himself to navigate using a sextant and the stars – Auralyn had no electronic instruments – and deputed a willing Maralyn to take charge of a galley in which “fresh fruits were individually wrapped in newspaper and turned regularly to avoid bruising”.
