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Jennifer Smith's sailing memoir Green Ghost, Blue Ocean

An honest, sometimes hilarious, sometimes terrifying account of living the dream aboard ‘a steamer trunk with a mast by Jennifer Smith.
Pottersfield Press
Pottersfield Press

The sailing season is here at last.

You’ve checked the shrouds, the winches are working as they should, and the jib is not dangerously worn.  You are ready to set sail for the wide blue yonder.

Jennifer Smith and her husband Alex (Nik) Nikolajevich had to do that and a whole lot more before they could set sail from Vancouver on their odyssey of sailing 40,000 nautical miles (74,080 kilometres) of ocean and spending seventeen years out of the corporate rat race, living the life so many sailors dream of and so few accomplish.

The charm of Green Ghost, Blue Ocean  - No Fixed Address – is that this is no puff piece about a young couple ‘poised and nautical in Breton stripes, gliding out of our slip shipshape and unruffled’ but an honest, sometimes hilarious, sometimes terrifying account of living the dream aboard ‘a steamer trunk with a mast’.

The author grew up here in Oakville, where her father taught at Appleby College. She attended Lakehead University and obtained her Master’s in geology at the University of Alberta. While she was working the summer for a junior gold mining company in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, she met her husband, Nik.  After marrying in Oakville, they relocated to British Columbia and, with the Pacific on their doorstep, took up serious sailing.  A dream was born.

You don’t have to be a sailor to enjoy what is essentially an adventure story.  There is an excellent glossary, and the author writes with such clarity and humour that you almost feel you are aboard –– and frankly, sometimes delighted you are not! 

From their home port, they sailed in their 42-foot sailboat west to Vancouver Island before setting out for Mexico, then embarked on the long Pacific Ocean crossing via French Polynesia to New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia to Madagascar by way of the Indian Ocean, Cape of Good Hope, the Atlantic Ocean and eventually Toronto via the Caribbean.  

This is no round the world without stopping saga, where time is of the essence.  Days ashore are enjoyed, even if it is for maintenance or to refresh the coffers and sometimes even to fly home to see family.  So different from a vacation, this couple’s seagoing adventure becomes a way of life. 

They explore the many places where they make landfall, enjoying local Kastam Dancing on Malakula, one of the Vanuatu chain in the Pacific, going on safari in Botswana in Southern Africa and checking out the remote Southern Atlantic island of St. Helena, where Napoleon was exiled.  (Reading their impression of places you have been lucky enough to visit adds to the enjoyment.)

Underway is another matter, and life can get really ‘hairy’! Sometimes the wind is kind, brisk and coming from the perfect direction for their next landfall, and sometimes it becomes lazy, dying completely and most often as they are attempting to make the next anchorage or dock by a prescribed time.  

But it is the tales of  ‘Two Percent Sheer Terror’, as one chapter is headed, that got this reader’s heart racing.  They are heading toward the French Polynesian chain of the Tuamotu Archipelago in the Southern Pacific when one night the winds gust to 45 knots (80+ kph), with roiling seas and torn sails. ‘We arrived . . . with the boat a shamble after four days of travel.’

But eventually, all good things must come to an end, and these two veteran bluewater cruisers have now stepped ashore back home in Canada, relocated to Burlington and their beloved now-ageing boat in a slip not too far away.