Out there, once you’re a few hundred miles off land, nothing else matters. The noise disappears first. Then the distractions. Then the feeling that anything back on land is urgent. No noise, no traffic, no people. Just the ship, the weather, and whatever comes next. Days blur into watches and meals, and nights stretch out with nothing but black water and the hum of machinery under your feet. It’s a strange place to make a living. Once you’ve done it, nothing else quite compares.

This book isn’t a full account of a long career, it’s just a collection of moments that stood out over the years I spent at sea. Some of them are strange, some are funny, some are just the sort of thing that happens when you spend long enough out there. The kind of things that don’t sound real when you tell them, but you were there, so you know they are. It’s not a big book. For the amount of time it’s taken me to write it, you’d think it would have ended up a lot longer.

So why the sea? That’s a fair question. I started sailing dinghies when I was nine and never really stopped. It was always there in the background. Wind, water, and figuring things out as you go, it gets into you early. When the chance came along to turn that into a job, I didn’t think twice. I started out working on the coast of New Zealand, then headed overseas and worked my way up on container ships. That’s where most of these stories come from. Some of it you expect. Most of it you don’t. Things break, weather turns, people do things they shouldn’t, and every now and then you end up wondering how you got yourself into it in the first place.