A Day Dreamers Bible

Reading South Sea Vagabonds

After getting fired from his office job during the height of the Great Depression, Aucklander John Wray did the most sensible thing in the circumstances: he built a 35 foot yacht and headed for the Pacific Islands.

As a boy I found a copy of South Sea Vagabonds, Wray’s account of his adventures, on my father’s shelves. To my 11 year-old eyes it looked intensely boring. This copy had an uninspiring water colour on the cover and dense print only relived by a few dry black and white photos. But desperate for something to read (my father did not, and still does not, own a TV), I gave it a go. I read it right through immediately and then convinced my brother to do the same. I had discovered a day dreamer’s bible.

It’s the promise of the islands of the South Pacific that brings many people to this book – the idea that somewhere out there is a place where the weather is always fine and exotic fruits hang over clear lagoons. It was this that gave Wray the impetus to build his yacht. But his outdated descriptions of dances and dusky maidens are no competition for those chapters setting out the construction of the Ngataki. It is deeply satisfying to read how someone with no skills or money, can build his own ocean going boat should they be so inclined. Wray shows that number eight wire can be more than a cliché about Kiwi ingenuity. He uses the stuff to make staples to hold his boat together, after coating it with tar he scraped off the road and melted down in his mother’s oven. With no money for timber, he scavenges kauri logs that have washed up on beaches. He caulks his boat with an old pair of pyjamas, and installs an ancient motor he finds dirt encrusted in a farm paddock.

After a launch and some navigation lessons carried out while lost on the high seas, the adventures follow: cruising, trading and ocean racing. The promise of the islands becomes real. Yet it is those days and nights building in his parents’ backyard that offers the best lesson in this book. When we put it down we want to pick up a hammer and some fencing wire.

South Sea Vagabonds ends with Wray briefly back in the office before making his next escape to the islands. Following publication, he married Loti, a young Tongan woman he describes meeting in the book. During the war years he served in the RNZAF, and in 1946 sold the Ngataki.

In an 2010 article, Boating New Zealand reported that after Wray, Ngataki passed through a number of owners, the most recent being Debbie Lewis of Picton. Lewis sailed her as far as South Africa, coming back via Panama. It was also reported that restoration was underway to take her back to her 1933 configuration. Otherwise the boat was in good shape. The fencing wire and the scavenged timber, the work of a self-confessed day dreamer, had held up well.