Radical adjustments of course appear to require a substantial amount of drama, a minimum of within the recounting: a decisive second, a flight from unhappiness, a marshalling of immense inner reserves. In fact, they’re typically extra gently underdetermined than that, as is Susan Smillie’s absorbing account of her life at sea in her boat Isean. There have been catalysts – the mutation of a long-term romantic relationship right into a deep friendship, the sense of fracturing and fractiousness that beset the UK after the referendum in 2016 – however there was additionally a extra gradual realignment of priorities, a gradual realisation that there could also be a unique and extra generative method to dwell.
Possibly it began when Smillie rescued Isean from a boatyard within the west of Scotland, the vessel’s swish strains blinding her to the hundreds of kilos that will be wanted for restoration. Earlier than lengthy, pottering up and down the Sussex coast didn’t appear sufficient, and Smillie set herself the problem of gaining the information and experience obligatory for longer, extra sophisticated journeys. On the identical time, as she progressed by way of her 40s, with a great and long-worked-for job as an editor on the Guardian, she got here to understand that it’s fairly potential to outgrow one’s desires. A course correction was wanted.
With a voluntary redundancy cheque in her pocket, Smillie stated farewell to her houseboat in London and determined to sail Isean spherical Britain, ultimately making her method as much as her father’s residence in Dunoon in Argyll and Bute. Instantly, she felt liberated by the prospect of doing precisely as she happy in as a lot time because it took. However at Penzance, with Isean in dry dock for repairs, one other plan struck her: what if she turned left at Land’s Finish?
To the non-sailors amongst us, this sounds completely implausible: absolutely there’s an unlimited distinction between tacking up and down the coast with land at all times in sight and making an attempt to cross an entire stretch of sea? Certainly, it was pretty implausible to Smillie herself – “Absolutely I couldn’t simply sail to Spain?” she thinks, earlier than upgrading her radio gear and shopping for a liferaft. There may be a variety of watching charts of the Bay of Biscay and worrying concerning the fabled “massive Brittany seas” earlier than it dawns on her that she had higher get on and go. What she didn’t realise was how lengthy she’d be gone for.
The HalfBird’s title is partly a reference to the title Isean, which is Scots Gaelic for “chick”, and partly a nod to the shape taken by the sirens of classical mythology, these temptresses who enchant after which imprison Odysseus. But when Smillie is lured in the direction of the ocean by a mix of restlessness on land and the joys of discovering herself accompanied by dolphins as she makes her method by way of the Pillars of Hercules and throughout the Mediterranean in the direction of Greece, she can also be swift to recognise peril. Crusing solo requires meticulous preparation, constant consciousness that climate circumstances and sea state can change in an prompt, and a readiness to attract on reserves of stamina and ingenuity.
It additionally requires a wholly completely different method of wanting on the world. Smillie writes persuasively of her shift in the direction of having and wanting much less, in each materials and emotional senses. She makes numerous mates all through her voyage and infrequently wonders whether or not to remain just a little longer in an particularly lovely or hospitable spot, however is keenly attuned to her want for a extra moveable, cell life. And he or she is conscious, too, of its fragility. A daunting night-time encounter with a gaggle of determined folks fleeing Algeria brings residence the fact that her journey is a matter of selection; probability conferences with aggressive males underline the specific vulnerability of the girl who chooses to make her method alone; the growing frequency of unpredictable storms demonstrates the destructive affect of human exercise on the setting by which we dwell.
There may be additionally the matter of these left behind. Along with her thoughts and physique targeted on the day by day exigencies of retaining her head above water, Smillie finds herself considering the losses she has suffered: of her brother Stephen, who was killed in a automotive crash when she was in her 20s; of her shut cousin Lorraine, who died of most cancers at 34; and of her mom, who shielded her youngsters from the information that she was severely in poor health for a few years earlier than she, too, died. These shifting components of her narrative are conveyed with spectacular fortitude and an understanding that her new lifestyle generally is a method of honouring her misplaced family members.
It’s exhausting to learn The Half Chicken with out questioning whether or not you can do it too: jack all of it in, head south, catch fish off the aspect of your lovely little floating residence. You most likely might, so long as you place within the years of studying easy methods to learn tide tables, scrape barnacles, function bilge pumps. It might be higher to start out by pondering Smillie’s wider message – that to work out what’s going to actually make you content, you first have to cease and odor the air round you.
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