Diana Bagnall recalls her first encounter with Mike Litzow, author of South from Alaska.

One morning in late September 2009, my skipper Alex and I were anchored at Horseshoe Bay, around the back of Magnetic Island, as fine a place as any to loiter a while in a boat. We were slowly heading down the coast from Far North Queensland. By then we’d been sailing for four months. Our 'shakedown cruise' was primarily designed to test whether I had the stomach for the bigger and better things which he had long dreamed of doing in a yacht, preferably offshore. I loved sailing, but was fearful that living on a boat meant the end of intelligent life as I’d known it.

By chance, by sheer chance, on our way out of Horseshoe Bay, we crossed paths with the Alaskans. It is perhaps an exaggeration to date my rebirth as a cruising sailor to this meeting, but not a huge one. I was open to persuasion, but then again, in Mike Litzow and his wife Alisa we met a couple as intensely alive to the world (and literate to boot) as we are ever likely to know on land or at sea. 

Alex and I were finishing breakfast that morning, and thinking about pulling up the anchor when I saw a young woman rowing our way. She had a little boy with her. I guessed they were off the sturdy, double-ended yacht which we’d noticed anchored nearby the previous evening. Alex identified her (correctly) as a Crealock 37, a cruising boat not often seen in Australia – ‘the choice of serious offshore sailors’, he said approvingly. Her name was Pelagic, and her home port was Kodiak, Alaska – the other end of the earth.

The woman, who introduced herself as Alisa, and her son as Elias, was on a fact-finding mission. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but we are heading for Hobart and I saw your boat is from Hobart and wondered if I could ask you about what we should expect down there,’ she said. We squirmed. The port named on our stern that year was one of convenience – a long story. We told her we were from Sydney, and she looked disappointed. As we later learned, Pelagic was intending to sail straight past Sydney on her way to Hobart. ‘Why don’t you come aboard anyway?’ I suggested. It wasn’t something I often said. It’s not that I’m unfriendly, but some yachties can be hard to dislodge once they settle in for a chat, and we were on a schedule, due to meet two of our sons off the plane in Townsville. But she was exotic, a bird all the way from Alaska, and I was curious.

That was how it started for us and Pelagic. We brewed fresh coffee; Alex, who is good with small children, set Elias up in the marine beanbag on deck, and I began a conversation with Alisa which, though sporadic, is ongoing. When she and Elias made to leave, I pressed on her a pile of New Yorker magazines. Manna from heaven. The next time we met, in passing in the Great Sandy Straits (tucked between Fraser Island and the mainland), she brought me over a new translation of Anna Karenina, and a loaf of fresh bread.

We didn’t meet Mike that first morning at Horseshoe Bay. He was writing, Alisa said. Lucky for him, I remember thinking. A toddler on board, and the guy gets leave to write? She gave me their blog address, and I began to read. The guy was good, which seemed unjust considering he was a marine biologist by trade. It wasn’t until Pelagic diverted into Sydney harbour a few months later, over New Year, and he and Alex discovered a common hero in the British explorer and writer Wilfred Thesiger, that the pieces began to fall into place. Disguised as a jobbing scientist and budget cruising sailor, Mike is a shameless romantic adventurer. He’d laugh at that, and say the romance has worn pretty thin on this second voyage – the one that he and Alisa have just made across the Pacific on a bigger boat called Galactic – but I’d wager that it’s still his starting point. When he gave me the first draft of his book to read, the one he was sweating over in Horseshoe Bay and which he finished in Hobart, amidst the kind of turmoil that only a crazed man would consider conducive to thought, I revised my description of him again. He’s a natural born writer.