Gordon Cook and Alan East Notice these expressions in the text. Infer their meaning from the context. ³ honing our seafaring skills ³ pinpricks in the vast ocean ³ ominous silence ³ a tousled head ³ Mayday calls I N July , my wife Mary, son Jonathan, , daughter Suzanne, , and I set sail from Plymouth, England, to duplicate the round- the-world voyage made years earlier by Captain James Cook. For the longest time, Mary and I — a -year-old businessman — had dreamt of sailing in the wake of the famous explorer, and for the past years we had spent all our leisure time honing our seafaring skills in British waters.
Our boat Wavewalker, a metre, ton wooden-hulled beauty, had been professionally built, and we had spent months fitting it out and testing it in the roughest weather we could find. The first leg of our planned three-year, , kilometre journey passed pleasantly as we sailed down the west coast of Africa to Cape Town. There, before heading east, we took on two crewmen — American Larry Vigil and Swiss Herb Seigler — to help us tackle one of the world’s roughest seas, the southern Indian Ocean. On our second day out of Cape Town, we began to encounter strong gales.
For the next few weeks, they blew continuously. Gales did not worry me; but the size of the waves was alarming — up to metres, as high as our main mast. December found us , kilometres east of Cape Town. Despite atrocious weather, we had a wonderful holiday complete with a Christmas tree.
New Year’s Day saw no improvement in the weather, but we reasoned that it had to change soon. And it did change — for the worse. At dawn on January , the waves were gigantic. We were sailing with only a small storm jib and were still making eight knots.
As the ship rose to the top of each wave we could see endless enormous seas rolling towards us, and the screaming of the wind and spray