About the Book

What compels someone with almost no experience of sailing to go and buy an eight-ton, thirty-foot cruising yacht? Especially when it’s located not only in another city but in another state! Why would someone like that risk sailing the boat home on a 1,600-nauticalmile voyage, even if it meant facing the daunting prospect of sailing through hundreds of miles of the largest reef system in the world across the infamous and fickle Gulf of Carpentaria and the open waters of the tropical Arafura Sea? This book has an often humorous description of events in an easy-flowing journal style. The progress of the voyage can be followed closely with map illustrations and photographs, and the descriptions of day-to-day-to-day events provide a wonderful insight into what life at sea on a cruising yacht might be like. Rich passages describe equipment failures, rough seas, being caught in torrential defiles, airless days, wondrous anchorages, sites of historical interest and scenery . . . and how a man became a sailor.

Features & Details

About the Author

Russ Swan is an Australian born in Longreach in central Queensland of Australia. In his younger days Russ worked in sheep-shearing sheds and a law-courts office. He was called up for National Service in the Australian Army, serving in the Vietnam War and followed with an Army career. After discharge he drove taxi-cabs for a while before joining the Northern Territory Police where he continued to work for 19 years. Russ is a cruising sailor with several voyages completed in Australian and Indonesian waters. He’s also a freelance travel-writer and author having published magazine articles and another book “A Tanimbar Experience”. A third book is currently being written as a sequel to “Lowana Comes to Darwin” and books on other voyages are also planned. Russ still lives in Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia.