Offshore Safety

Voyaging on the boat they built together

Australian voyagers Mike and Gay Lewis are longtime live-aboards who built their own boat and have sailed extensively, including having passed all of the five Southern Ocean great capes. They started their voyaging career by building their 36.5-foot ferrocement boat Expeditus in their backyard. The building program of nights and weekends took the couple four years and nine months before the boat was launched in December 1977.

From 2005 to 2008, the Lewis’ did a major refit of Expeditus that included a new engine, rigging, cabin top, cockpit, new paint, sails, solar panel and more.

In a series of multiyear stints, they sailed in the North Sea, the North and South Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, including the U.K., Cape Horn, the Falklands, the Canaries, the Caribbean, the Bahamas, the U.S., the Azores, Madeira, Gambia, Brazil, Cape Town, Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Borneo, peninsular Malaysia and Thailand. They are presently in Langkawi, Malaysia.

OV: How do you approach the subject of safety? Has your experience sailing offshore affected your thinking on safety?

M&GL: To us, safety has two major components: keeping your boat off the rocks, and keeping yourself on the boat.

Keeping your boat in its element instead of on the rocks requires many things — planning sheltered anchorages, allowing for wind shifts, squalls or unexpected gales, avoiding rocks and reefs, having adequate ground tackle, having a “let’s get out of here” plan, and much more.