Dream fulfilled by six-year adventure
Dodging icebergs and colliding with whales are a few of the experiences a Riverton couple took in while sailing around the world in their yacht.
Alan Forrest and Anne Pilcher Gough sailed back into Riverton harbour this week, five years and 10 months after setting off from there on a trip of a lifetime in June 2015.
“It had always been a dream of ours,” Forrest said.
He had earlier sailed to Australia and the Pacific Islands, while Pilcher Gough had sailed from New Zealand to Scotland and made a few trips across the Atlantic.
“We wanted to see more of the world, you learn so much that way,” Pilcher Gough said.
They manoeuvred around icebergs in South America but the whale strikes, near Tanzania, came out of the blue. A female whale and her calf were struck.
“We hit the mum, then she flicked her tail at us . . . there was a big thump and then a bang,” Forrest said. “We were very lucky to have a steel yacht.”
Forrest and Pilcher Gough visited 29 countries, mostly in the yacht but sometimes travelled by air or land after anchoring their vessel in a safe place.
“When we found a safe place to leave our boat, we’d start looking at places we could visit,” Forrest said.
While at sea, they each did threehour shifts, 24 hours a day, keeping watch while the other slept or took a break.
Sixty knot winds in Beagle Channel in South America tested their resilience. However, the worst part of the trip was the discovery of rats having eaten numerous parts of the yacht after Forrest and Pilcher Gough had anchored it in the Solomon Islands for three months to avoid the cyclone season.
During that time the couple went to Australia.
The rats had eaten through wiring of the yacht’s radar, depth sounder and automatic identification system. Repairs were done in Darwin and Indonesia.
In the first half of 2020 the couple
went into a three-month Covid-19 lockdown at a yacht club in Valdivia, Chile. They slept on their yacht but had use of the club’s facilities.
‘‘There were 20 other boats there . . . it was a safe haven, and we had our masks,’’ Pilcher Gough said.
With uncertainty about further impact of the pandemic the couple decided to head back to New Zealand sooner than expected. They had planned to return to Auckland to be spectators at the America’s Cup yachting event in March but arrived early when sailing into Opua, in the Bay of Islands, in October.
The couple left their yacht at Opua while they flew to Southland to spend December and January with family and friends in Riverton. Forrest and Pilcher Gough then sailed the yacht from Opua to Auckland to be among spectators at the America’s Cup. Afterwards, they sailed the yacht to Riverton in stages.
‘‘It was the best thing I’ve done, so special to share it with Anne,’’ Forrest said of the world trip.