There was little chance that I would be anything else than a wanderer coming from my family. By the time I was 10 years old I had lived in Melbourne, Wagga Wagga, Lipari Italy, Bochum Gerthe Germany, attending school in all those places, and travelling many countries in Europe with my family. The whole family, my Italian father, German mother and older sister, traveled from Australia to Europe and return by ship via the Suez Canal, stopping at exotic places like Aden, Port Said, Cyprus, Egypt, London; so I was hooked on ocean voyaging at a very early age. Lots of years later, having made a little money working, and on the side renovating and reselling houses, grown kids having left home, my husband, Mauro and I set off, in 1986 on our first sailing boat, Lorelei II, a steel Breekvelt 39 to explore the world, never having owned or sailed a boat before. We knew that we would have to work again before too long, but we set sail for Europe and hoped to get there before we ran out of money. We headed up the east coast of Australia, then across the top, day-sailing through poorly charted shallow waters off Arnhem Land, our first exposure to the Australian aboriginals in their natural habitat, an eyeopener, on to Darwin to prepare for our very first overseas passage to Indonesia. Our skills with a sextant were rudimentary despite both having taken several coastal and celestial navigation courses; it is quite different taking a sun sight on beach on a calm day, than when seasick on a bouncing boat in the middle of the ocean. But we learned as we sailed, gaining in confidence as our experience grew. We became expert at dead reckoning; the sun and stars often do not cooperate when you need a position sight, paper charts only, GPS was not widely available yet, so we often were not entirely sure where on earth we were. We never made it to Europe. The Gulf War broke out, making us nervous of travelling up the Red Sea, We had to be somewhere to work before we ran out of money, so after sailing up the Malacca Straits to Thailand, we returned south to Singapore, then through the Philippines, where we spent quite a few months waiting for just the right weather window to do the 1,000 mile passage to Hong Kong; a couple of times we left after a typhoon, only to head back to our safe anchorage due to huge seas and no wind. In Hong Kong we both found very lucrative work. We lived on board our little Lorelei II in Aberdeen, Marina Club, an exclusive, luxury marina in Hong Kong, working and stashing away a nest egg for our future sailing adventures for 5+ amazing years. Now early 40s with quite a lot more money, we decided to sell Lorelei II and buy Lorelei III in San Diego, USA, planning to head to South America, the Magellan Straits, then up the other side across the Pacific, destination Europe. Once again our financial well-being dictated our next move. We lost a lot of our hard-earned money in the US dot com stockmarket bust, so we decided, as we were nearing 50 years of age, that we needed to concentrate on getting together a nest egg for our old age, and the best way to do that was to return to Australia where we felt more sure or our prospects to develop a business. So the next 5 years were spent in Australia, creating and growing a small chain of homewares stores. We were successful, both of us jumping in and doing everything from ordering, storeman, deliveries, relief cashier, and manager in the early days, until we could justify staff.
We were realistic enough to see that the future of retail was online so when the business was big enough to attract a buyer, we sold out, bought a Lord Nelson 41, SV Shadow of Lorelei, departing Australia in 2006, sailing to Japan via Louisiades, PNG, Solomon Islands, Micronesia and the Philippines. We spent more than 2 years in Japan, sailing first to Honshu, circumnavigating the Inland Sea and Shikoku, and sailing to South Korea; what a wonderful experience, I don’t understand why more sailors don’t go there. The hospitality was amazing, and the fun of learning a completely foreign way of life and language very challenging. We sailed Shadow Of Lorelei south to Philippines, ending up in Subic Bay, Luzon, the ex-US military base which had been abandoned in 1992 after Mt Pinatubo erupted. There is a nice marina, courtesy of the US military, inside a secure compound, where Mauro unexpectedly passed away at our farewell dinner, the night before we were to sail the 800 miles south to Borneo. After a few months I found a friend , Terry on Valhalla, who offered to help me sail Shadow of Lorelei to Kota Kinabalu, Borneo, and there the boat and I stayed on and off for the next 5 years. It was not a hardship, living in Malaysia with the luxury of a 5 star marina and yachtie friends. I felt very lucky; there were several other ‘widows’ on boats there, who helped me greatly to ease into single life. An easy life, sitting in a 5 star marina sounds wonderful, and in fact KK is full of interesting places and people; I did a little volunteer teaching, lots of exploring and eating, but my itchy feet got the better of me. I wasn’t quite ready to give up my sailing life, so, after a couple of attempts at single handing which I really did not enjoy nor want to repeat, I decided to leave my boat safely in Kota Kinabalu and crew on someone else’s boat. Someone suggested I try Find-A-Crew, where I found Wasatch, and one other boat, both with plans which interested me, both looking for someone like me to crew . David and Wasatch won the toss as he was departing Fiji earlier, and he sounded over the phone like a decent person. I have been sailing on Wasatch with David ever since. The first season David & I sailed from Fiji to Vanuatu, then back down to New Zealand, a pretty rough introduction to sailing on Wasatch, but great nevertheless.
David wanted me back the next season, to sail from New Zealand to the North Pacific, via Tonga, Kiribati and Tuvalu finishing the season in the Majuro in the Marshall Islands.
From there we sailed through Micronesia, Palau, then on to the Philippines, where David spent a year in Danau. Cebu doing needed repairs. I rejoined him once more next season to sail Wasatch to Kota Kinabalu where we parked our boats side by side.
The pattern kept repeating, I would sail on Wasatch for the season, return to Borneo to maintain my own boat, also visiting my family in Australia until the next sailing season. David was getting a bit sick of me flying off every time we arrived somewhere, and, although I loved being based in KK, I was getting frustrated spending my time maintaining a boat which was deteriorating and not going to sail anywhere, so we together made the decision to sail Shadow of Lorelei back to Australia, sell her, so I could stay on Wasatch full time to help with the many maintenance chores which David was doing alone. We left Wasatch in Miri, Borneo, and sailed Shadow of Lorelei, stopping in Mindanao Philippines, Kavieng Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands -Gizo and Liapari, Solomon Islands, then Bundaberg and finally arrived in Brisbane Australia. It was a tough delivery with lots of things breaking down, but the boat sold quickly, and we set off together to explore the rest of the world.
I still return to Australia periodically, spending time with my family is important to me. David & I continued on to explore Borneo, the Philippine Islands, Malacca Straits up to Thailand, across to Sri Lanka, India, Maldives, Rodrigues, Madagascar, Africa, Brazil, on to Trinidad, the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and finally the good old USA. I am not done yet, there is still lots of the world left unexplored – South America and of course, Europe if I ever make it there. In the meantime, we plan to do a lot of exploring of the American continent while the opportunity is right outside.