Imagine 117 days adrift – with your partner

The extraordinary 1973 ordeal of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey comes to life in Sophie Elmhirst’s telling

272pp, Chatto & Windus, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£18.99, ebook £9.99

Imagine that you’ve been at sea for almost a year on a 31ft Bermuda sloop. It is small but sturdy, the “Morris Minor of the yachting world”. It doesn’t have a radio transmitter, to preserve your “freedom from outside interference”. You’re sailing due west on the Pacific Ocean, about 325 nautical miles from the Galapagos, under clear blue skies, no land in sight.

Then, one morning at 6am, the stillness is torn. A dying whale, 30ft longer than your boat, is flailing alongside, and into the side of it. Down in the galley, there’s now a hole the size of a briefcase. Water begins to pour through. Nothing can be done, you realise. You have 10 minutes to gather what you can, step off the boat and into the dinghy you’re towing.

Maurice and Maralyn Bailey had quit 1970s British suburbia in pursuit of adventure. The married couple had sold their house, bought a sloop (Auralyn), spent four years getting it up to spec, then set sail from Falmouth for New Zealand. While Maurice likes to drive at 100mph, he becomes cautious and awkward at sea. Maralyn, by comparison, is charismatic and resourceful, with a deep well of positivity – and this will prove the Baileys’ saving grace.

What happened to them that morning in 1973, and how they survived 117 days adrift, is the subject of the journalist Sophie Elmhirst’s first book, Maurice and Maralyn. It speeds along like a novel. Years of preparation, then the thrill of sailing and boat parties give way to 82 pages of two people and the ocean. A diet of tinned food turns into meals of fresh shark; they’re tortured by seeing the odd ship in the distance, but the ships not seeing them. It would test anyone’s faith.

Even so, there are moments of levity: their delight in a small pet turtle, or their trialling of larger turtles to pull their raft across the ocean (not a goer).

“It is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive as the absence of surrender,” Elmhirst writes. The Baileys take turns reading to one another from the two books they have saved (Voyaging Under Sail, by the sailor Eric Hiscock, and a biography of Richard III); they play dominoes and cards created from pieces of paper; they make plans and sketches for Auralyn II. There are arguments, too, and while Elmhirst gives little detail on their substance, it’s implied that they’re mundane. Either way, with nowhere to hide after a fight and little to do but unpick it, the Baileys become well-equipped in conflict resolution. Eventually, after nearly four months on the ocean, they’re saved by the seventh ship they see.

Elmhirst, an experienced journalist, realised early on that the Baileys’ story could be more than just a long-form feature. She fleshes out the oddly familiar context of early 1970s Britain – inflation, strikes – and alongside the Baileys’ own (several) books, draws on photos, newspaper archives, filmed interviews and her own sit-downs with the couple’s family and friends.

Despite experiencing the worst that could happen to any sailor, barely two years later, Maurice and Maralyn set off on a second adventure. It was much more successful than the first – and, as such, much less interesting book material, as their editor unsuccessfully tried to tell them. Then, in 2002, Maurice was widowed, and without Maralyn to guide him, he was lost. He passed his days bell-ringing, and at a local teahouse. Eventually, he found a way, after a fashion, to bring her back, through writing letters to “B”, a friend of Maralyn’s, in which he retold their adventures yet again, and in minute detail. The idea of living “afloat, alone, unshackled from obligation and community” might be appealing to some; but the sombre ending of Elmhirst’s book would give anyone pause.

Keeping their oar in: the Baileys relive their ordeal at the London Boat Show in 1974