Lady Luck favours our 76-year-old sailing star

The gods are certainly with our senior yachtslady, Jeanne Socrates, 76, as she battles her way across the Tasman Sea to pass south of New Zealand.

The Tasman is a wild sea. Very wild.

When I crossed it first I was an eight-year-old. With the family, I had sailed on the 20,000-ton Orontes from Tilbury, on the Thames, to Sydney, and hadn’t felt a hint of mal-de-mar for all those leagues of ocean.

 We changed ships to a smaller liner for the Tasman crossing to Auckland.

The torture

 Scarcely one day out, I learned about seasickness. I was certainly ill and so chronically that for many, many years I could hardly look upon a seascape without my stomach reminding me of the agony.

 The memory of the torture took some overcoming when I returned to the sea as a young adult.

 I competed in Royal Ocean Racing Club events and then a two-handed round Britain, and a singlehanded race to the Azores and back. When I circumnavigated to become a singlehanded Cape Horner, there I was on the Tasman again, a wild, wild Tasman, and yet when Jeanne is there, as she is now, it becomes a very different stretch of ocean.

Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventuring book, Sailing to Purgatory, at http://sailingtopurgatory.com/index.php/feeds/390-lady-luck-favours-our-76-year-old-sailing-star