1
Family Adventure Extraordinaire

      How would you educate your children, if you decided that cruising the seas was the best lifestyle for your family?

      Before addressing these conundrums, let me sketch in the main character and set the scene.

      Paul was born in Cambridge, England, in 1941. When he was six Paul's father abandoned his mother and three children to fend for themselves. Soon thereafter Paul had to start earning money to keep the family together.

      While his brother joined the Royal Navy at an early age and his sister went off to a teacher's college, Paul took some engineering courses and became a flight engineer for Freddy Laker's airline.

      Laker Airlines was decisive for Paul's life in a couple of critical ways. First, he discovered that he had a knack for and loved repairing anything mechanical: engines, hydraulic systems, compressors, you name it.

      Second, his stint with Laker Airlines also instilled in Paul a burning desire to explore the world. Wherever he flew, he brought along a break-down bicycle. On landing he assembled the bike and pedaled the countryside in search of adventure.

      When Laker Airlines folded, Paul apprenticed himself to Gerald May, a master boat builder, and learned every aspect of boat building. That, combined with the mechanical skills that he had picked up at Laker, made the world begin to look like Paul's oyster. If there is one constant on the seas, it is that boats and equipment break down. Paul not only could pretty well write his own ticket at any port he appeared at, but he loved the work to boot.

      Paul operates by a standard that now is rarely practiced: he never charges boat owners anything if he can't take care of the job he undertakes. But this hasn't exactly put a crimp in his income. Of the thousands of repair jobs he has done, only three fell into that category - and you guessed it - it was due to the lack of necessary parts.

      After his successful apprenticeship with Gerald May, and working for himself in England for a while, Paul took off for South Africa for a couple years where he did boats and anything mechanical, while exploring the country in his off hours.

      In 1973 he went to Australia. While hanging around the Great Barrier Reef, he ran into Ben Cropp, the Jacques Cousteau of down under. When Cropp's boats had mechanical problems or were damaged by reefs, Paul swiftly put them back in good working order.

      Late in 1979 Paul returned to England with a sizable chunk of cash. His dream was to build himself a luxurious, wooden yacht to his exacting specifications. He commissioned the topflight marine architect firm of Laurent Giles to prepare the plans and drawings for 10,000 pounds.

      Since he earned a sufficient amount of money while in Australia, he didn't intend to skimp on the material and equipment, which put him back 100,000 British pounds.

      He named the yacht "Rhapsody," launched it in 1981 and after successful sea trials, turned it over to Lloyds of London to obtain a registration number, as is the general practice in Britain. Lloyds does its own comprehensive inspections and sea trials, and if the boat passes their exacting standards, issues a registration number.

      To Paul's shock and dismay, his boat, which had been insured and put in a secure marina, pending Lloyd's inspection and registration, was pirated.

      "I was told that someone had signed for the boat and taken it away. It turned out that the thugs had forged my signature from a check," Paul explained in somber tones.

      "It was pirated in the most horrendously bad weather and unless they were expert sailors they couldn't go far. I got my charts out and plotted where they were likely to be, given the prevailing winds, tides and currents. I found my boat, phoned the police and they were able to arrest the pirates."

      A happy ending to a potentially disastrous episode? Not quite.

      The local police, as it turns out, were more of the bungling, Keystone Kop variety than Scotland Yard caliber.

      According to what Paul was able to piece together later, the police told the modern-day pirates to wait on the boat, while they completed some paperwork at the police station. But since neither the thieves nor the boat had been secured, the criminals just sailed off again with their booty.

      As soon as Paul learned about this latest turn of events, he put in a call to his friend Nick who owned a World War II Spitfire and had him mount an air search. Nick spotted the boat quickly. This time Paul got an injunction, which placed the boat and the thieves in the custody of the court.

      Paul and the bailiff went to the boat and put a writ on it. The thieves had stripped and stolen a lot of the equipment. The bailiff signed it into a boatyard for safekeeping under the auspices of the court. What Paul didn't know at the time was that the boatyard was owned by the gang that stole it originally. This time they took it down the river, set it afire, with the apparent intention of destroying the evidence.

      The fire was spotted and reported to the authorities before it had consumed the entire boat. But by then nothing could be done to save the boat. "What remained soon sank. I rang up the helicopter base in Coldwall that does rescue work. With Nick's help, [and the fact that the boat skeleton was a potential navigational hazard] they provided a helicopter and sea divers who were able to put chains under the wreck for me. I built a huge raft out of empty oil drums and we waited until the tide was low to put the chains around the drums. When the water rose with the tide, it lifted the boat from the bottom. All we saw was the drums going into the water taking the weight. There was seven to eight tons of boat down there. I arranged for a tug to tow it to a beach. When the tide went out we got a big truck and towed it up the beach. Police came, ran their tests and verified that it was arson.

      "I found out who the thieves were and I took then on in a civil court. The insurance company won't pay. They kept saying, 'No, we can't prove that this is the boat we insured. It doesn't have the registration number.' I showed them that the drawings (which were for only one, custom-designed boat), and that the charred remains matched. But still to this day they have not paid off. The boat was valued at a quarter of a million British pounds. The litigation is still going on.

      "We had a big court session in London recently. I was there for three weeks. I fought and fought. I did get some satisfaction: the wife of one of the thieves' had a nervous breakdown in the open court from the stress and is now in a mental hospital. Another thief's wife died in a hospital. But that doesn't really help."

      Paul has become philosophical about it all. "You can't sit down and wait for life to pass you by while these things go on," he told me. "In the meantime some good came out of it: I met Linda."

      At this point Paul laughed and turning to Linda, who was sitting close by and asked her: "Was that a good thing?" She smiled.

      "When I lost the boat I had nothing at all. I lost everything, all the money I earned. Everything went into building the boat.

      "I met Linda in '82. I was staying with my sister who had just bought a big house. It was only a shell. I fixed that up for her, since I had nothing else to do. I met Linda in the same village."

      Linda had been working for the government as a social worker in a mental hospital. She was on a six-month sick leave because she was suffering from recurring migraines.

      "She didn't know what to do with herself and I was available, and she thought that was a great idea," Paul laughed as he said that.

      Within three weeks of meeting, Paul and Linda got engaged and were married three months later. Her house was brand new and they decided to live there. Paul set up a business in Leeds. Their first son, Simon, was born a year later. Their second son, Daniel, came along four years after that.

      Paul and Linda had a yen for adventure. They just weren't the type who liked to stay put and lead routine lives.

      "First we thought of buying a motor boat, but we found that it was beyond our financial reach. So we decided to build the motor boat instead, but not like the first one."

      One of the reasons the Jaunceys decided on a motor boat instead of a sailing yacht was to prevent the kind of calamity Paul had experienced. In the motor boat Paul built in numerous anti-theft devices which will disable the boat should anyone try to steal it.

      "This time I built the boat in stages, rather than buying all the material at once. I commissioned the drawings in '85 and started building in September '86, when the drawings were completed. I put up a big building in the yard for it. I was doing my regular job and working part time on the boat. It took five years. The last two years I worked on it full time. We sold our house so we would have enough funds to finish it. We sold it at a very fortunate time when property prices were very high. We also sold stocks on which we made considerable money. This capital just about saw us clear to get the boat finished. So we have something in reserve, Linda's dad lent us 5,000 pounds, which we are still paying back from our work.

      "Apart from that, we own the boat free and clear. I finished it in May '91 and launched it in August. Linda arranged the color schemes of all the interior upholstery. I did the sea trials. We sorted things out for a year. I worked on my sister's house to earn a bit of extra money for fuel and provisions.

      "The boat is very, very comfortable; we are totally happy with it. We got just about everything we need: a dishwasher, a microwave, and a refrigerator. In my spare time I'll build a freezer so we can provision more bulk stuff and it will be cheaper to live. Other things we would like to get is a SSB radio and a water maker. It would save us the hassle and expense of having to go to marinas for water. Apart from that, we are self-contained. We have our own 220 volt power plant on board. Everything right now is very comfy. It's a lovely little boat to sail around in."

    In October 1992, the Jaunceys, with their two small sons, cast off from England for a trip around the world.

      "As a marine engineer I could work as we went along. We went down to Gibraltar in three weeks. We were there for six months. Initially I got a job in construction, so I could get a work permit right away. That meant that the children could go to school. We do have to keep up their education as much as possible. We have the advantage of my sister being a headmistress in a school in England. She sends us the necessary books to keep up with the British national curriculum. Linda does the day-to-day tutoring. When the children return to England periodically, they are tested on how they are doing academically.

      Initially the Jaunceys thought of going east through the Mediterranean and working their way around the world in that direction. They started chartering, along with doing boat repairs. Motor Boat Magazine commissioned them to do an article on how one could start a charter business in the northern Mediterranean. They thought it would be easy enough to do since it was all part of the Common Market. That is not how it turned out.

      Spanish authorities demanded that they change flags and pay a thirteen percent registration fee. On a boat that is valued at 290,000 British pounds, that is a prohibitively high fee, which the Jaunceys couldn't afford. They appealed to the Common Market administrator in Brussels. The Spaniards let them operate the charter business while the appeal was being processed. But Brussels eventually rejected their appeal.

      "That's when we decided to move on. But it was the end of season and the weather was getting bad. It wasn't a good idea to go east. We also felt that the Common Market countries would probably treat us in the same way and try to keep us out of the chartering business in the Mediterranean.

      "We turned around and went back to Gibraltar to pick up some extra money through boat repair and prepare our own boat for crossing the Atlantic and on to the Caribbean.”

      While in Gibraltar, Paul ran into Mike Burke, Sr., owner of the Windjammer fleet. It turned out that Burke had just bought a government boat-building yard in Trinidad, with the idea of expanding his fleet and needed someone with Paul's experience to supervise the construction of a 300-foot, four mast, tall ship. Paul accepted the offer, pending the Atlantic crossing and seeing a bit of the Caribbean.

      "We took the bull by the horns and prepared the boat for the crossing. Originally our range was about 900 miles and we had a 4,000 mile trip to do. Our motor boat has two 120 horsepower diesel engines. What we decided to do was have bag tanks, which we would fit around the boat and install a pumping system, which would transfer the fuel to the main tanks of the boat. I had a jib and a small mainsail made, which proved extremely useful on our Atlantic crossing.

      "We had to split the trip up into three parts. Gibraltar to the Canaries, then from the Canaries to Cape Verde, which is roughly 900 miles. The third leg was going to be from Cape Verde to Trinidad.

      "We filled up with fuel in Gibraltar and started testing the fuel system on the way. We would put the fuel into the bag tanks, test the system en route, and measure the fuel consumption of the boat far better on longer runs. Total capacity, with the bags full, is 800 British gallons.

      "We put up the sails, but we didn't find the mainsail very effective. The jib itself was fine; it drew beautifully. It pulled the boat at an extra knot. We were at the Canaries for Christmas, and left 3 days later for Cape Verde. Here again we picked up the current and the trade winds.

      "The boat went at three miles per gallon, which was incredible. This meant that with the full 800 gallons we could have a range of 2,400 miles. We spent a week in Cape Verde where we filled up the tanks. We didn't know how the boat would react to 3.5 tons of fuel on top of the sixteen tons of the boat itself. With the extra water, we were looking at a grand total of twenty-one tons.

      "It came right up to the water line. Then there was the question of how it would handle. As it turned out, we had nothing to fear; it handled beautifully. We managed to pick up the current and the trade winds again. I still wasn't totally sure we could make Trinidad, which was close to 2,300 miles away. This would leave us a hundred miles of reserve fuel. If we had any real problems, it would have been close and I didn't fancy that. So I decided to go to Barbados instead, which was only 2,020 miles away. That would leave me 380 miles to spare. As it turned out we actually did 4 miles per gallon. That would have given us a 3,200 mile range."

      But because the two crew members they had hired for the transatlantic crossing were lazy, inexperienced and rebellious - at one point even talking about tossing the kids overboard - Paul decided to bypass Barbados and go to St. Lucia instead.

      "In Barbados," Paul told me, "it is difficult to discharge crews. They have some funny rules in Barbados. The skipper has to take them to another boat, check them in with another captain who would be willing to take them. Or the crew members have to have active tickets for another destination. Since we were okay on fuel, we carried them to St. Lucia and dropped them off there.

      “Then we decided to have a holiday cruise down the Grenadines, and go to Trinidad from there. And of course we ran into you, Al, in St. Lucia and signed you on board.

      "After this trip we are going to write an article for Motor Boats Monthly, because we like to keep people informed of what they can do if they put their mind to it.

      "In Trinidad we'll send the kids to school so they can learn to mix with the local kids. We'll probably live on the boat and take off on weekends for exploring.

      "After a year in Trinidad we plan to go all the way up through the Caribbean chain using my trade to earn money as we go. Maybe even as far as Miami. From there I'd like to go through the Panama Canal and take the boat across the Pacific, and back to Australia. I'll be getting jobs along the way.

      "The longest run is from Panama past the Galapagos, where we can't refuel because it's a national park. To the Marquesas Islands is a distance of 3,500 miles. We do have provisions to put two extra bag tanks in the third cabin. Which would mean that it is a viable trip. It would also be the longest trip ever for such a small boat. So we would certainly set the world record on that one. We already got the smallest motor boat record across the Atlantic. On a straight line run and with a 1,000 gallons of fuel we have nearly a 4,000 mile range. After the Marquesas the longest leg is 1,000 miles.

      "I have a friend in Brisbane, a bank manager, who wants a 60-foot custom made yacht built. If I build him one, I'll build me one as well. I'll build the two alongside. Then this boat will go to the children. They will be old enough. It is already registered in their names as well as ours. A British merchant ship on a blue book comes with 64 shares. Even if it's QE2 it has only 64 shares. Each member of our family has 16 shares each. If anything happens to us, the kids won't have any hassle taking legal possession of the boat."

      According to Paul the Dreamworld is valued at 290,000 British pounds. The yearly insurance premium is 3,000 pounds, which the Jaunceys can't afford. Should anything happen to the boat, they would again be out a lot of money.

      We had a close call while entering St. George's harbor in Grenada. It also illustrates how Paul's reputation as a top-notch marine engineer spreads in rather unusual ways.

      One of the most embarrassing, not to speak of potentially costly mistakes for a skipper, is to run his boat aground. And that's exactly what Paul did as he was trying to enter St. George's harbor. It's bad enough for this to happen when you are in a relatively secluded spot. But this was right at the mouth of the entrance to St. George's harbor, with a huge gallery of animated spectators lining the shore.

      But the most gratifying thing about the entire episode was how fast and willingly a yacht and two dinghies in the vicinity came to our rescue. As the yacht Lady Clarissa. was towing us off the combination sandbar and coral reef, the towing rope inadvertently overturned his own dinghy and fouled up the attached outboard with salt water.

      After the successful rescue Paul motored over with a bottle of champagne for the captain of Lady Clarissa. While there he found, as expected, that the dinghy's motor, which was now full of salt water wouldn't start. Paul convinced the captain to let him take the outboard back on his dinghy for repairs. In less than an hour Paul had disassembled the motor, cleaned, oiled it and had it running like new and returned to Lady Clarissa. The captain was duly impressed and wound up saying something to this effect: “Paul, I have a number of things wrong with Lady C. that I would like you to take a look at.” Paul couldn't do it in Grenada, but agreed to rendezvous at Port of Spain, Trinidad.

      The reason that Paul ran aground in St. George's wasn't because he was a poor sailor. It turned out that the green and red harbor signs in the Caribbean are the just the reverse of what they are in Europe, where Paul learned to sail. The rescuing captain informed him that he had seen four boats go aground in as many days. And the reason that the St. George's port authorities aren't doing anything about it, according to one wag, is that the groundings were doing wonders for the port's ailing economy, not to speak of the spectacle it was providing for the locals ashore. The Dreamworld didn't seem to have sustained any damage from going aground.

 Postscript: The biggest challenge Paul and Linda are facing is the education of their two children. As I have already mentioned, Paul's sister is a schoolmistress in England and sends them textbooks and workbooks appropriate for children Simon's and Daniel's ages. And when they return to England for holidays, they are tested for their academic proficiency. When they stay at a port for any length of time, as they plan to do in Port of Spain, Trinidad, they will attend the local schools.

      But even more importantly the boys are getting an education which no kids living on land could ever get. They are learning the world first hand— not through geography books. And Simon, while only ten, shows maturity, industriousness and responsibility vastly beyond his chronological age. He raises and lowers the anchor, navigates, ferries people in the dinghy and is an apprentice to Paul. He is an immense help to Paul in his work. By the time he is an adult, his economic prospects should be secure if he sticks with boat building and repair.

      But at the same time Simon is no Goody Two-shoes. He regularly provokes his brother Daniel into verbal combat when things get boring.