Sailing into a nightmare - Part 2

Sailing into a nightmare – Part 2

I grew up in the coastal town of Whakatane on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand.
At the age of twelve my father threw me into a p-class yacht and I learnt to sail for the first time. At the same time my eldest brother Kerry purchased a yacht of his own and set off from Darwin into South East Asia with his friend Stuart Glass and Kerry’s girlfriend. Back then there was no social media, communication was very difficult, certainly not phone calls and the staple was letters. Kerry wrote wrote the most amazing letters and my dad would read the letters round the kitchen table, together. We lived vicariously by Kerry’s adventures and it kind of planted a seed in my mind, at that time, that one day I too would go saying the seven seas and have adventures similar to my brother and I have.
I was 14 years old when those beautiful letters from Kerry stopped. Time past and we had no idea what had happened to Kerry and his crew. My father wrote letters all around the South East Asia’s ports looking for information, contacting friends, other sailors, nothing, we had no idea. We heard the devastating news sixteen months later. Kerry had been captured by The Khmer Rouge, taken prisoner back to Tuol Sleng prison, where he and his charter, and Englishman called John Dewhirst were tortured for two months, forced to sign confessions to being CIA, and were then executed.

Thank you to BNO productions for letting us use footage from Brother Number One in this vlog.
Brother Number One trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39l1fBwYxIQ

Links to film https://www.amazon.com/Brother-Number-One-Rob-Hamill/dp/B011T5D9PC
or
www.op.co.nz/film/brother-number-one/

Music
David Mumford – Ball and Chain
Musicbed.com

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BACK STORY
In 1997, after rowing at the Atlanta Olympics, Rob rowed a tiny 7m (22 foot) plywood boat 2,500 miles from Tenerife (Canary Islands) to Barbados (Caribbean). It took six weeks for Rob and rowing partner, Phil Stubbs, to complete winning the inaugural Atlantic Rowing Race.

Skip forward to 2014 and, married with three children, Rob and his wife Rachel purchased Javelot, a 43 ft Fountaine Pajot catamaran. Armed only with Rob’s 3 years of racing P class yachts from the age of 11 to 13, and Rachel’s non existent sailing knowledge, We set off to learn the ropes of ocean sailing. We broke stuff, replaced stuff and got to know their boat before heading offshore with the kids, Finn (then 13), Declan (then 11) and Ivan (then 8), in tow. Through trial and error we have become confident wayfarers, kind of.
The plan? To sail around the world.
Part of the journey will be retracing Rob’s eldest brother Kerry’s travels at sea. Using Kerry’s original letters from the 1970’s we hope to retrace his movements from Australia through Indonesia and South East Asia to Cambodia where Kerry’s life was cut short after straying into Cambodian waters in 1978. Kerry and two friends were attacked by a Khmer Rouge gun boat, captured, tortured and executed. www.brothernumberone.co.nz
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