![The Baileys in Jan 1974 with the sextant and raft that helped them to survive](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/02/13/TELEMMGLPICT000364924643_17078235783200_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwVGtmp-S2mpFD-59S3IygKU.jpeg?imwidth=680)
The British couple who survived 117 days adrift on the Pacific Ocean
Maurice and Maralyn Bailey quit 1970s Britain to sail for New Zealand – then a catastrophe left them struggling to survive
![The Baileys in Jan 1974 with the sextant and raft that helped them to survive](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/02/13/TELEMMGLPICT000364924643_17078235783200_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwVGtmp-S2mpFD-59S3IygKU.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Imagine that you’ve been at sea for almost a year on a 31-foot Bermuda sloop. She is small but sturdy, the “Morris Minor of the yachting world”, with certain modifications including full headroom, a high freeboard and a galvanised steel wind-vane, for steering, bolted to the deck. She doesn’t have a radio transmitter, to preserve your “freedom from outside interference”. You’re sailing due west on the Pacific Ocean, around 325 nautical miles from the Galapagos, under clear blue skies.
Then, one morning at 6am, a crack, a jolt, the stillness tearing at the seams: a whale flailing alongside your boat, a good 10 feet longer. It breaks the water, then smashes back down, thrashing to escape its own body. Its death is imminent. Down in the galley, there’s now a hole below the waterline the size of a briefcase. Water begins to pour through, cupboards spring open. Nothing can be done, you realise, to save the boat. You have 10 minutes to gather what you can, step off the boat and into the dinghy you’d fetched, and watch the boat that was once home follow the whale into the depths of the ocean.
Maurice and Maralyn Bailey had quit 1970s British suburbia in pursuit of adventure. The married couple had sold their house, bought a sloop, spent four years getting it up to spec, then set sail from Falmouth for New Zealand. But you don’t just up and leave. Alongside the logistical preparations, there’s the mental kind: the development of seamanlike qualities, as taught by Eric Hiscock, the writer of Voyaging Under Sail, to which Maurice, as the Auralyn’s captain, constantly refers. While Maurice likes to drive at 100mph, he remains cautious and awkward at sea. Maralyn, by comparison, is charismatic and resourceful, with a deep well of positivity – which will, in the end, prove the Baileys’ saving grace.
What happened to them that morning in 1973, and how they survived 117 days adrift, is the subject of the journalist Sophie Elmhirst’s first book, Maurice and Maralyn. It speeds along like a novel. Years of preparation, followed by the thrill of sailing and boat parties, give way to 82 pages of two people and the ocean. The pacing, not to mention the detail, of their mental transition is remarkable. A diet of tinned food turns into meals of fresh shark; they’re tortured by seeing the odd ship in the distance, but the ship not seeing them. It would test anyone’s faith. Even so, there are moments of levity: their delight in a small pet turtle, or their trialling of larger turtles to pull their raft across the ocean (not a goer).
“It is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive as the absence of surrender,” Elmhirst writes. They take turns reading to one another from the two books they saved – Voyaging Under Sail and a biography of Richard III – they play dominoes and cards created from pieces of paper, they make plans and sketches for the Auralyn II. There are arguments, too, and while Elmhirst gives little detail on their substance, it’s implied that they’re the mundane fights that happen within most couples. With nowhere to hide after a fight and little to do but unpick their behaviour, the Baileys become well-equipped in conflict resolution. They survive through sincere harmony and respect.
![Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, who survived four months adrift in a rubber dinghy after their yacht sank in the Pacific Ocean, relive their ordeal at the London Boat Show](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/02/13/TELEMMGLPICT000364924649_17078241481150_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq_Qt1iuvWth76e9d_IW2U0bNmajAM0FJ-hmoUWpKNwt4.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Eventually, after nearly four months on the ocean, they’re saved by the seventh ship that passes. When word gets out about the couple’s rescue, the private becomes public, and the media become hungry for the sensational story. But how do you communicate how it felt to starve – to feel as though you would never see another human being again? The Baileys don’t shy away from the media, though: Maurice doing most of the talking at their first press conference in Hawaii, and when Maralyn does speak, it’s only to downplay the hardship. From there, it’s a series of lunches and dinners and drinks. Everyone wants their turn with the couple who survived 117 days at sea.
Elmhirst, an experienced journalist, realised early on that the Baileys’ story could be more than just a long-form feature. The backdrop she paints of Britain in the early 1970s – its struggle with inflation, an oil crisis, industrial strikes – sounds strikingly familiar to today’s; perhaps that’s why the Baileys’ decision foreshadowed a modern trend (#boatlife). Alongside the Baileys’ own books –117 Days Adrift, Second Chance: Voyage to Patagonia, The Galley Handbook, When the Water Becomes Still – Elmhirst draws on newspaper archives, photos, filmed interviews and her own interviews with the couples’ friends and family to track their story and situate it within 20th-century Britain.
Despite experiencing the worst that could happen to any sailor, the Baileys’ thirst for adventure was unquenched. Barely two years after being rescued, Maurice and Maralyn set off on a second adventure. It was much more successful than the last, and as such, much less interesting book material, as their editor tried to tell them. (Second Change: Voyage to Patagonia came and went without notice). In 2002, Maurice was widowed, and from there, he passed his days bell-ringing and at a local tea-house. Without Maralyn to guide him, he was lost. Eventually, he found a way to bring her back, through writing letters to “B”, a friend of Maralyn’s, retelling their adventures yet again in minute detail. The idea of living “afloat, alone, unshackled from obligation and community” might be appealing to some; but the ending of Elmhirst’s book would give anyone pause.
Maurice and Maralyn is published by Chatto & Windus at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books