Lowana Comes to Darwin

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.