It was around the end of August when Peter and Jennifer Bernard moored their 50ft cutter-rigged ketch, Steel Sapphire, at the marina below London’s Tower Bridge.
Their journey to circumnavigate the globe was supposed to have taken them back to Sydney within five years, but after four, they had only reached the British capital. They were halfway round and years late.
The forces of the natural world with the dictates of seasonal cyclones and a global pandemic had seen their “beautifully laid plan fall apart”.
Peter, 50, learned to sail as a teenager and had always planned to sail around the world when he retired. It was Jennifer, 52, having lost a close friend to cancer, who challenged Peter when they got together: “Why would we wait until we were in our 60s?”
Unlike most who tackle the odyssey, they didn’t come from engineering or trade backgrounds, so the two self-described corporate “desk jockeys” spent eight years learning about engine maintenance, plumbing and first aid.
“But the truth is, we could never have learned everything,” Peter says. “Ultimately, you just have to set a date.”
The couple sold their three-bedroom house in Glebe to buy the yacht that would become their home on the seas. They left their management jobs in the pharmaceutical industry and set off from Sydney Harbour on 1 July 2018.
“Between 2010 and 2018, everything that we planned we did to the letter and left on the day we said we would leave,” Peter says.
“Everything was perfect. And we then had a very detailed plan for what was going to happen next – month by month, everywhere we were going to be in the world, and not a damn thing of [that] has come true.”
Casting off
After travelling along the east coast of Australia and then from Darwin to Indonesia, Jennifer says it was in Thailand that their “beautifully laid plan fell apart”.
There, a small refit “got delayed and delayed and delayed, and we missed our opportunity to sail across the Indian Ocean”.
Because of seasonal cyclones, “You have to follow the weather. The weather dictates as to where we could be in the world and what time it’s safest.”
The couple decided to make the most of the situation by returning to Indonesia’s Anambas Islands, which they had “raced through” on their way north.
“If no one knows about them, that’s great, because they are a hidden gem,” Jennifer says.
“At the time,” Peter says, they thought: “It’s not that bad, it’s only the first year. We’ve got all of 2020. What can possibly go wrong in 2020?”
The Bernards arrived in Maldives the same day authorities declared a Covid-19 lockdown, which saw them and those aboard 15 other boats confined to their vessels.
After a month of being forbidden from setting foot on land, the government gave those on private boats permission to go ashore on a private island during daylight hours.
After four months in the Maldives, on 11 July 2020 the couple sailed on.
They were one of nine boats to secure a permit from the British Indian Ocean Territory Administration to enter Chagos Islands despite Covid restrictions.
The islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, 500km south of the southern tip of the Maldives, and thousands of miles from land in any other direction, was the home of the Chagossian people until 1973, when the entire population was forcibly removed by the British colonial administration.
While the British allow private boats to stop at Chagos if they can prove they have a valid reason for safety at sea respite, the UK refuses to allow the descendants of Chagos Islanders to return.
As part of their three weeks on the islands, the couple spent time on Boddam Island, seeing the vestiges of homes, stores, a church and a cemetery – “all solidly built over a 100-year period from stone, and now lying in ruins since the people were forced to leave”.
Peter says what was equally sobering was the rubbish – broken beer bottles scattered among the ruins, and assorted sailing debris including buoys, floats, jerry cans, a damaged rudder, even a mast – left by a different era of cruising before the concept of “leaving a clean wake” was established.
“It was hard to know what to feel more sad about … the fate of the Chagossian people, forcibly evicted and unable to return despite UN resolutions demanding that the UK allow them to, or the terrible abuse of the ‘white privilege’ enjoyed by the yachties who were allowed to come here when the Chagossians were not, and showed so little appreciation of the beautiful and pristine environment that they spoiled it for everyone in the future,” Peter says.
The rising tide of Covid
After three weeks on the Chagos Islands, the Bernards sailed on to Seychelles on 4 August 2020, “and that’s where the world really wasn’t opening up as fast as we hoped or wanted”, Jennifer recalls.
“We had to weigh up that decision: do we sail on to South Africa and miss out all the islands we wanted to see, like Mauritius and Réunion and Madagascar, because they were all closed, and even South Africa was closed, so it was a risk to sail there, albeit we’d been told it was likely to open soon,” Peter explains.
They made the decision to stay in Seychelles for an extra year to be able to see all the places they had planned to on their adventure.
The Bernards had to accept they’d lost two years out of their five-year plan. They decided that in order to get their finances back on track, they would stop in London to work and earn enough money to complete the second half of their circumnavigation.
While the pandemic’s disruptions cast their plans into disarray, this also took them “off the beaten track for most sailing cruising routes”, and the couple say it’s some of these places that proved the most memorable. For example, because Covid prevented them from visiting so many countries, they decided to sail an alternative route through the Red Sea, which took them to Tanzania.
There they climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, went on safari, hung out in coffee houses in Zanzibar and spent a few days helping a remote island community where their friends had installed a generator the year before.
“We’ve had places where the sailing was better for sure. We’ve had places where the food was better for sure, but Tanzania was just this multifaceted experience” Peter says.
When the couple sailed through the South Atlantic, they travelled from Cape Town to Namibia, then on to Saint Helena, where Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled, and eventually on to Ascension Island.
Jennifer says it was in this last place that “to get ashore, it’s the most difficult dinghy landing with this huge swell coming in”.
“You have to partially tie up to this pier, which you then have to leap in between swells with these huge Galápagos sharks circling underneath your dinghy just waiting for you to fall in.
“And these are the bitey human-eating kind of sharks. You’re not allowed to swim in Ascension, because the sharks developed a taste for humans. It was incredibly exhilarating and scary, and I can’t believe I did it.”
An epic return
For Peter – who emigrated to Australia from Scotland in his 20s after falling in love with the country as a backpacker – the highlight of their journey was sailing up the River Clyde into the port in Largs, where his father taught him to sail.
“I was expecting that my dad would come out in his boat and greet us,” Peter says. “The bit I wasn’t expecting was that my parents had organised for a bagpiper to be standing on the bow of my dad’s boat – so as we moored it up to them, the bagpiper struck up Scotland the Brave and then proceeded to serenade us all the way into the marina.
“That was a pretty epic moment. I don’t know that many other moments in my life will be as epic. Bear in mind, this is Scotland and by rights it should be pouring down with rain, but it wasn’t. It was beautiful sunshine and the heavens smiled and it was perfect.”
As part of our vessel intercepts today we spoke with the skipper of the sailing yacht Steel Sapphire and his wife.
— MPSonthewater (@MPSonthewater) August 29, 2022
An unusual one as they had only just arrived in London after leaving home in Sydney, Australia... FOUR YEARS ago! 🤯 👏 pic.twitter.com/Do24iWVeBf
“The pandemic has made us change our plans,” Jennifer explains. “This is just a different chapter to our journey. And so we’re going to make the most of living in London and enjoying what this amazing city has to offer.
“We don’t know how long it’s going to be. We know it has to be a fair length of time because we really need to save up a lot more money, and it’s a chance to spend time with Peter’s family and friends.
“We do believe that we will finish our circumnavigation, but as they say, sailors’ plans are drawn in the sand at low tide.”
You can read more about Peter and Jennifer Bernard’s adventures on their blog, Sailing Steel Sapphire
