Ship of Dreams

Pursuing a lifelong dream, I left my home in Japan and moved into a trailer house in New Zealand, ready to start building a 21-foot sailing vessel in which to circumnavigate the globe alone. This is the story of building that boat, named Resolution, and all the ways in which an amateur boatbuilder can go afoul of Murphy’s Law—if anything can go wrong, it will. This is not a how-to book, though there is some detail of building Resolution. It’s a story of pursuit. A story of soldiering on, as John Welsford put it, in pursuit of a dream. It’s a story of how many small steps come together to result in something bigger and more robust than originally envisioned. I sailed away from Tauranga Bridge Marina, past the Mount at the mouth of Tauranga harbor, down the Coromandal Peninsula, past the Gulf of Hauraki, and on toward Fiji on the first leg of my planned circumnavigation. Early one morning in mid-June 2008, a rescue helicopter fished me off a large volcanic rock at Great Barrier Island, New Zealand. This book is about how that happened as well. And how fortune guided my footsteps, then and now. The story of Resolution. How she came to be and how she ceased to be. A ship of dreams.