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My mother made a particular point of teaching me navigation, too. ‘Barnacle Bill taught me,’ she said, ‘I’m teaching you. I know it’s not on the curriculum, but so what? It could come in handy, you never know.’ She taught me how to use the sextant, take compass bearings, plot a course on the chart. I had to fill in the longitude and latitude in the ship’s log, every morning, every evening, without fail.
I don’t think I had ever really noticed stars before. Now, whenever I was on watch in the cockpit at night, with the Peggy Sue on her wind-vane self-steering, the others asleep below, the stars would be my only company. Gazing up at them I felt sometimes that we were the last people alive on the whole planet. There was just us, and the dark sea about us and the millions of stars above.
It was on watch at night that I would often do my ‘English’. This was my own version of the ship’s log. I didn’t have to show it to them, but I was encouraged to write in it every few weeks. It would be, they said, my own personal, private record of our voyage.
At school I had never been much good at writing. I could never think of what to write or how to begin. But on the Peggy Sue I found I could open up my log and just write. There was always so much I wanted to say. And that’s the thing. I found I didn’t really write it down at all. Rather, I said it. I spoke it from my head, down my arm, through my fingers and my pencil, and on to the page. And that’s how it reads to me now, all these years later, like me talking.
I’m looking at my log now. The paper is a bit crinkled and the pages are yellowed with age. My scribbly writing is a little faded, but it’s mostly quite legible. What follows are just a few chosen extracts from this log. The entries are quite short, but they tell the tale. This is how I recorded our great journey. This is how it was for an eleven-year-old boy as we rode the wide oceans of the world on board the Peggy Sue.
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