I have received a number of inquiries about “Lady Alone” from readers asking what inspired me to put pen to paper and what events in my story actually happened.
I had learned of this disastrous experience while dining with fellow sailors at a local pub in Phuket, Thailand. The tale told was not long nor detailed, only that an unnamed woman with no sailing experience had faced every sailor’s greatest fear, man-overboard on the high seas.
Whether the tale told was fair-dinkum or just ‘one of those stories’ didn’t seem important to us, no doubt because we all understood the gravity of a novice sailor’s baptism by a worst case scenario. What followed were confessions of our own white-knuckled moments and how consequences ride on every wave.
With the specter of that conversation looking over my shoulder, I set about answering an essential question for my version of the recounted story. What inciting incident would drive someone with no sailing experience, like Joan, my main character, to leave her life in New Zealand and travel six thousand miles to Guam with the intention of crossing an ocean on a sailboat with a captain she had never met?
Such a bazaar scenario demanded a credible reason, a psychological need for Joan to make such an extreme decision. Enter her ex-boyfriend who refuses to let go, her best friend who backs out on the trip at the last minute and Joan’s narcissistic mother from whom she seeks validation, catalysts that drive Joan to prove her worth to her mother and to herself.
Leaving New Zealand for the unknown was not without consternation but staying put would give Joan’s mother a penalty win. So, there Joan is, in a Guam hotel, unaware she had set into motion a cumulative effect of past and future events that would crash down on her when the boat’s captain is swept overboard during a nighttime storm.
With the captain’s loss and Joan’s rudimentary knowledge of sailing, I borrowed snippets from that past conversation with friends and my own experiences to drag Joan through a nightmarish struggle for survival. That struggle at sea ends with her being shipwrecked on a deserted island where suffering continues to mark her every move.
Rescue offers Joan a glimpse of salvation but this is not a Get Out Of Jail, FREE card. That would be too easy, as would be her explanation of events leading up to the captain’s fate, her word against Neptune’s. What my story needed to continue the drama was irrefutable evidence of murder.
As desperate as Joan had been on the boat after the captain’s demise, I had given her enough control over her deteriorating situation to cling to life and not give up. Even on the deserted island she had a smidgen of reprieve with water from a coconut. Then, after winning the authorities’ acceptance of her plausible scenario for how she came to be alone, any thought of control is snatched away by evidence found on the boat, evidence that points to a motive for murder and which all claims of ignorance fail to quell suspicions.
Once again tossed into a den of merciless circumstances and feeling she is shackled to the helm of a sinking boat, I ended Joan’s misfortune with a character unknown to her. This mystery man has a past of his own with direct links to the sailboat and through a winding tale of deception and abandonment, he concludes with a confession that lifts all suspicions from Joan.
The final chapter of Joan’s story brings her face to face with the causes that had driven her to extremes and their life changing effects. The woman who had been on death’s front porch after an ill-conceived attempt to prove herself has profoundly changed, a transformation from the frustrations of passive compliance to empowerment, a lady alone no more.
