The voyage and the great wave

'We're Not Afraid to Die... if We Can All Be Together' is a true story of survival at sea. In July 1976, the narrator, his wife Mary, their son Jonathan (six) and daughter Suzanne (seven) set sail from Plymouth, England. They dreamt of repeating the round-the-world voyage made 200 years earlier by Captain James Cook.

Their boat, Wavewalker, was a 23-metre, wooden-hulled ship. It had been built by professionals, and they had spent months testing it in the roughest weather they could find. The first part of the voyage, to Cape Town, went pleasantly. Before leaving Cape Town, they took on two crewmen, the American Larry Vigil and the Swiss Herb Seigler, to help them face the Indian Ocean, one of the roughest seas in the world.

In the southern Indian Ocean, strong gales blew for weeks, and the waves rose as high as 15 metres, as tall as their mast.

On 2 January, the waves grew enormous. The captain prepared carefully. To slow the boat down, he dropped the storm jib and tied a heavy rope in a loop across the stern (the back of the boat). Everything on deck was tied down twice, and everyone put on lifelines, oilskins and life jackets.

At about 6 p.m., the wind dropped and there was a strange, eerie silence: an ominous sign. Then a huge, vertical wave, almost twice as high as the others, rose behind them and crashed down on the boat. The captain was thrown overboard. Just as he thought he would drown, the boat came up again, and he was hurled back onto the deck. The boat was full of water.