Wild Adventures of a Kiwi Family at Sea
By Edith Staff
In Has Anyone Seen Evan (rrp $36.00) New Zealander Edith Staff shares
the adventures and experiences of over twenty five years of sailing experience,
three of them offshore.
In her early 20s Edith
took a shine to a young man named Kit Staff.
Taken a shine to? ‘Well’, she
explains, ‘that’s the very PC way of saying that this guy was the most interesting
crazy hunk of male I had ever met to this point in my life. Without knowing I was even entertaining the
thought, I was thinking that I would love to spend the rest of my life not too
far from where the centre of his world might be. And a lot of his world was sailing.’
It was on their sturdy
and reliable 50 foot steel sailing ketch Christabelle that Edith and Kit, and their
three young children Evan, Dulcie and Penelope went sailing in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. They cruised to Fiji,
Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Federated States of Micronesia
and along the coasts of New Zealand’s North Island and East Coast of Australia,
helping create the foundation of a huge amount of their children’s life skills
along the way.
Each chapter of the book
tells of an adventure - and with this family there were many! Edith also talks about how she coped with the
day-to-day duties required of her as mother, deck hand, teacher, and occasionally,
a navigating skipper
She
says ‘A large proportion of our time afloat was calm and uneventful, however we
did seem to have a strong peppering of events ranging from flat-out terrifying
to just plain inconvenient. So I felt it would be fun to record these
adventures not only for posterity but also to share with others, be they
sailors or not.’
Foreword
– by Derry Godbert
If you are a sailor, armchair
or real, particularly of the cruising kind and enjoy sitting around the saloon
table exchanging sailing experiences you are very likely to really enjoy this
collection of cruising tales. Armchair sailors will equally enjoy the range of
adventures Edith has splendidly described.
The book starts with a
small boat and big adventures. Anyone thinking of taking up sailing in cruising
boats can read about all sorts of things to do and not to do while working your
way along a time line of developing cruising skills from the small boat start
to even bigger and better boats. Edith’s sailing tales are amplified by the off
shore aspects of later cruising, the presence of Dulcie and Penelope in the
stories, also the diving skills of husband Kit with older son, Evan.
...I can recommend this
book as a true and accurate account of a remarkable set of boating experiences.
Includes
more than 100 colour photos.
I crewed with Kit and Edith Staff in 1991 onboard the Christabelle for three weeks cruising from Pohnpei to the Mortlock islands,the Truk Lagoon, and the Hall islands. Kit and Edith were a team of master seamen, navigators (sectant), engineers, musicians, mathamaticians, motor mechantics, radio repairmen and gourmet cooks. Kit and Edith were pure professionals, knowledgeable in all skills needed to sail outward into open ocean, navigate days aross landless seas to tiny atoll islands and return to tell the tale. There are no words that I have to express my joyous emotions from living onboard with both Edith and Kit. when I departed the airport in Weno, they both bid me farewell. I was in tears, knowing that rarely in life do such moments of living intensely in the moment, leaving behind on shore all the excess baggage of other thougts and worries to be completely free and alive, tethered only to the Christabelle and crew knowing that final good bye would come one day and it would be forever. That exerpience was a force multiplyer in my memory of those gloreous days. Memories that are so wrapped within my soul that life thereafter is measured against that experience of open ocean cruising and people are measured against the stout hearts, strong hands and flashing eyes of Kit and Edith, alive and alone in chaos of wind and ocean currents, riding the timeless tracks of the Pacific Ocean.
ReplyDeleteRoger Benson - regornosneb@sbcglobal.net