Swirly World Lost at Sea

By Andrew Fagan, Swirly World Publications, 2024. Paperback, 312 pages, plus 16 pages colour photos. $40

Reviewed by Rebecca Hayter

For those of you who are virgins to Andrew Fagan’s writing, it pays to settle into one of those big inner tyre tubes, let go your mooring line and drift with the current. Because his writing style, perhaps as a dip or a nod or a boom-boom-da to his song writing career, is a stream-of-consciousness vibe rather than that of a disciplined scribe. Put your inner editor aside and submit to a slightly-crazy, introspective – and, hey, never looked at it like that before – and you’ll be just fine.

This is Fagan’s third book in a trilogy of the Swirly World series: the life story of his feisty 5.18-metre yacht, Swirly World in Perpetuity. The first book was Swirly World: The Solo Voyages (2001) in which he recounts his entry in the solo New Plymouth to Mooloolaba Race and Swirly World Sails South (2012), in which he ventured south to the Sub-Antarctic Islands. I had been there by expedition ship and thought he was crazy to take that tiny boat into huge ocean rollers. He’s blatantly raw when it comes to human discomfort. Sometimes he shares more than you want to know, but there is courage in honesty, and his skills and discipline under adversity reveal a significant and intuitive degree of seamanship.

And so to Swirly World Lost at Sea. We already know it’s not going to end well. It’s a long journey, via that crazy inner creative being that resides in this rock star-turned-sailor-turned-muse, but we find ourselves in the Southern Ocean on an attempt to set the record for the smallest boat to sail around the world solo via the Great Capes. Fagan had been building up to this for years, getting distracted by other projects, the need to make a living and even to avoid the reality of what he was taking on. Yet here we are: Fagan is listening to New Zealand radio and the famously Kiwi tones of radio host Karyn Hay, his life-partner. She’s at work on the radio waves as Fagan battles a different kind of wave in the world’s vastest ocean. It’s a poignant image.

But then it comes, the annoying sound that heralds impending disaster. The rudder is saying it wants to leave soon and threatens that its demise will allow the Southern Ocean to come aboard.

Radio show host Karyn Hay turns home-based rescue coordinator, along with the official coordinators, of course, and she does a great job of trying to find a salvage option for Fagan and his boat. We are permitted to read over her shoulder as she works via emails. For anyone who’s known the agony of waiting while a loved one is in peril on the seas, her calm management is like shelter in the storm.

But back to the storm unfolding. This is where Fagan’s slightly crazy, evocative, introspective and sometimes self-indulgent writing style comes to the fore because we feel every wave, every drop of determination – and every ice-cold dollop of pain and doubt – in seeking safe harbour for his boat before she founders. The next landfall, Cape Horn, is not an option. He’s desperate for a ship capable and willing to pick up his boat from the sea and carry her home. From the reader’s comfy armchair, it’s hopeless. But by then, we have left the armchair and are alongside Fagan on a small, leaking boat that is making the wrong kind of moves and the wrong kind of noises.

Then finally, the captain’s submission: accepting the inevitability of rescue by a massive, stonking great container ship – but that means abandoning Swirly World, Fagan’s patient maritime companion since 1985.

It is a giant leap for a man – rescue from a tiny dot of a boat to a monolith of ocean-going engineering is perilous. Many writers would wrap this up in a page or two. It takes hours, pages, attempt after attempt and soulful, mortal observations. We quail through Fagan’s forlorn hope of taking some possessions, three bags, then maybe just a couple or one, and finally, making that leap with nothing but his life, basically. This book is no doubt part of processing that visceral separation.

Published by Swirly World Publications, the book’s production enhances the reader’s experience with excellent design, quality of paper stock and production quality.

About Fagan, for the benefit of younger readers. He was/is frontsman for The Mockers band which he formed in 1979. It’s best known for one of my favourite songs: (Without you my life’s gonna be) Forever Tuesday Morning. Ironically, it’s a fitting tribute to Swirly World in Perpetuity:

I'd give up everything I own for you

I'd have a piece of nothin' pie

I'd wait alone here for that rendezvous

If only I was not so lonely

If only I was not so homely

If only I was not so lost within you

Without you my life's gonna be forever Tuesday morning…