Sailing Magazine
By Richard Crockett
Despite living in Africa, how many yachties can brag about having circumnavigated the continent, let alone even dreamed about it?
One who can, and the author of this feature today, is John Levin. Those who know John understand his passion and thirst for sailing. He is on the water EVERY weekend in Cape Town aboard his Stadt 34 ‘Indaba’, and has crossed the South Atlantic aboard her many times.
Many may question his choice of yacht, yet Levin and ‘Indaba’ have done hundreds of thousands of nautical miles together. On this passage he had Noel Mallinson as crew.
I asked Levin to pen a feature for SAILING magazine when he came through Durban on the final leg back to Cape Town. These are his opening words: “How does one describe an adventure of a lifetime in just a few pages? I can’t, so all I will try to do is to give some insight into a number of aspects of our trip.
“We left Cape Town on 4 January 2003 for Rio de Janeiro and returned again on 6 December 2003 having sailed from Brazil to the Azores, to Spain, to Italy, to Croatia, to Greece, to Turkey, to Cyprus, to Israel, to Egypt, to Aden, to the Seychelles, to Mayotte, to Durban, to Knysna and home again.
“Although only 11 months in all, the duration of the odyssey extended well over 10 years as the anticipation was every bit as enjoyable as the voyage itself. Indeed, the antecedents of the voyage are to be found much, much earlier when, as a child, my father bought a sailboat and I started my relationship with the sea on Saldanha Bay.
“While the heroes of other boys were rugby stars and cricket stars, mine were the yachtsmen from all the corners of the world who put into Saldanha Bay and went on to write books with evocative titles such as “The Wind is Free”, “On the Wind of a Dream” and the like, which I devoured eagerly.
READ HIS AFRICAN CIRCUMNAVIGATION HERE: Pages from 2007 04 – SAILING Magazine – OCR
