Peggy Sue sets off on a round-the-world voyage

The Peggy Sue sets off on a round-the-world voyage after Michael’s father turns unemployment and a long-nurtured sailing dream into a family undertaking. The departure on September 10, 1987, is more than the start of a route from England across the world: it marks the family’s passage from familiar routines into a life of shared work, risk, and dependence, whose consequences reach far beyond the voyage itself.

From unemployment to a voyage

The plan began before the family ever reached the yacht. Michael’s father had imagined sailing around the world during his years working in the factory, but regarded it as a dream rather than something he could act on. Losing his job changed the calculation. With little prospect of finding another, he weighed putting the family’s limited severance pay, savings, and money from the car into the bank against using those resources for a once-in-a-lifetime journey. He chose the voyage, imagining a route through Africa, South America, Australia, and the Pacific, to places the family had previously known only from dreams and magazines.

At the marina, he introduced the family to the gleaming dark-blue yacht as the Peggy Sue and announced that it would be their new home. The revelation left Michael’s mother quiet while his father explained the scheme over tea in the galley. His proposal was specific: six months of training, then a voyage lasting a year, perhaps eighteen months, depending on how long the money lasted. He envisioned Michael’s mother as skipper, himself as first mate and handyman, Michael as the ship’s boy, and Stella Artois as the ship’s cat. The family would first take shorter trips across the Channel and perhaps to Ireland, learning the forty-two-foot boat together before setting off.

The venture was not presented as carefree escape. Michael’s father had considered the family’s savings, the dangers, and the practical work involved, and promised that they would do it safely and properly. But the decision was also driven by desperation: the loss of work made a risk that once seemed unthinkable newly possible. The family knew the undertaking looked like madness, yet the shared prospect of adventure bound them to it.

Training and the family crew

The preparation took longer than Michael’s father had expected. The family learned that handling a forty-two-foot yacht was not simply dinghy sailing on a larger scale. Their instructor, the experienced mariner Bill Parker, was known to them as Barnacle Bill. He had sailed around Cape Horn twice, crossed the Atlantic single-handed twice, and made the Channel crossing countless times. His expertise gave the family a practical education in the difference between enthusiasm for sailing and readiness for blue-water conditions.

Barnacle Bill was a harsh teacher. Michael and Stella Artois both received his disdain; he considered children and animals liabilities aboard ship, and Michael kept out of his way as much as possible. Yet the training had a lasting effect. By its end, Michael’s mother had earned her certificate, and the family felt able to take the Peggy Sue where they needed to go. They had learned respect for the sea without losing confidence in their ability to manage what it might bring.

Life together aboard also changed the family’s relationships. Close quarters made Michael’s father more than a parent: he became Michael’s friend and shipmate, and the two came to rely on one another. Michael’s mother’s determination emerged through the work of mastering books and charts day and night. As skipper, she insisted on keeping the boat shipshape, but her family was proud of her and confident in her command. The first mate and ship’s boy did their part at the winches, at the helm, and in the galley. By the time the yacht was ready, the family understood itself as a team rather than merely a group sharing a plan.

Casting off

The family finally sailed on September 10, 1987, with every nook and cranny loaded with stores and provisions. Grandma came to wave them off in tears. Although she had earlier warned them about icebergs, hurricanes, pirates, whales, supertankers, and freak waves, she ended up wanting to join them for a visit to Australia and a chance to see wild koalas. Friends gathered at the departure, including Barnacle Bill and Eddie Dodds, who threw Michael a soccer ball as the yacht cast off. Eddie had signed it all over, turning it into a keepsake as well as a lucky mascot for the boy.

As they passed through the Solent, Stella Artois barked at the people and boats around them. But when the Peggy Sue sailed past the Isle of Wight, she fell quiet. For Michael, that silence sharpened the difference between imagining an expedition and actually being at sea: there was no turning back, and the voyage had become real. The family’s departure thus closes the period of planning and preparation with a threshold crossed in open water.

The voyage soon tested the confidence their training had built. The family had planned to cover about two hundred miles a day, roughly eight knots, but during the first week they were fortunate to make fifty miles a day. The Bay of Biscay brought Force 9 gales, at times Force 10. Michael feared the Peggy Sue would sink as waves pitched the bow toward the moon and hurled the vessel down the far side. The yacht held together, and the family reached Spain, but the passage made the sea’s force an immediate, physical counterweight to the adventure they had imagined.

A route measured in weather and landfall

Michael’s account of the journey is framed by his shipboard log. The entries were his own record, encouraged by his parents and written during night watches; he later describes the surviving pages as yellowed, crinkled, and still mostly legible. This form makes the voyage legible through the changing observations of an eleven-year-old: dates, distances, weather, landfalls, and the work of learning to navigate become the measures of an experience too large to grasp all at once.

The route gave the family repeated alternations between the open sea and the exhilaration of sighting land. On October 11, Michael saw Africa in the distance as the Peggy Sue sailed down its west coast. His mother showed him the chart and explained the next leg: the wind would carry them along the coast before they crossed the Atlantic toward South America. They needed to avoid drifting into the Doldrums, where the lack of wind could leave a vessel becalmed for weeks. The chart offered a plan, but the possibility of stillness in the wrong waters also showed how much progress depended on conditions the crew could not command.

After the long ocean passage from Africa, the family sighted Australia off Perth on April 3. They hugged and jumped up and down, exhilarated that they had sailed from England to Australia and completed half of their circuit of the globe on their own. The landfall briefly made them feel like discoverers, though it was a familiar continent and a charted destination. Their excitement was set against a worsening concern: Michael’s mother’s stomach cramps had returned, and she promised to see a doctor in Australia.

The cost and consequence of departure

By July 28, the adventure’s risks had become inseparable from the family’s daily survival. Since leaving Sydney, storm after storm had driven the yacht farther north across the Coral Sea. The rudder cable had snapped, and although Michael’s father had repaired what he could, it remained unreliable. The self-steering no longer worked, so someone had to stay at the wheel continuously. Michael’s mother was too ill to take her share: her stomach cramps had become much worse, she would not eat, and she could manage only sugared water. She had been unable to study the charts for three days.

The division of responsibility narrowed under pressure. Michael’s father wanted to send a Mayday call, but his mother refused, seeing it as giving in. Father and son tried to navigate together, though Michael feared they no longer knew where they were. As his parents slept below, exhausted, he stood watch in the cockpit with Eddie’s signed soccer ball beside him, hoping for his mother’s recovery and fearing another storm. The keepsake that had accompanied the hopeful departure now sat beside a boy confronting the possibility that the crew might not be able to withstand what came next.

The route’s most intimate consequence is the contrast between the planned family voyage and Michael’s later separation from it. When he falls into the sea, the yacht’s lights recede into the darkness and he believes no one can hear his cries; the voyage that had brought the family together becomes the means by which he is left alone in the ocean. Elsewhere, the family’s continued search eventually brings the Peggy Sue back to the island. Michael watches it arrive with his mother and father aboard, after saying goodbye to Kensuke, and runs out to meet them. The departure’s promise of a shared journey therefore ends in a changed form: the family is reunited, but its adventure has passed through loss, separation, and a homecoming that could not restore life to what it had been before.

The voyage begins with the family choosing movement over the slow depletion of their savings and with the conviction that careful training can make the undertaking safe. Its actual course preserves both sides of that choice: the family does learn to sail and crosses vast distances, yet gales, equipment failure, illness, and the open sea repeatedly exceed the security its preparations can offer. In the narrative, setting off is consequently both an act of hope and the first step into conditions that will reshape the family’s understanding of home, responsibility, and what it means to come back.