WORLD WANDERER 100,000 MILES UNDER SAIL. 2022 – 50 Year Anniversary Edition

World Wanderer tells the story of a young Australian who went in search of adventure on the sea. He sailed 100,000 miles on six sailing ships – three schooners, a barque, a sloop, and a ketch -circumnavigating the world.

When eighteen years old he learnt to handle seacraft through the treacherous corals of the Great Barrier Reef, and then set off eastwards across the Pacific, to make his first landfalls on the fabled South Sea Islands. In these islands he was shipwrecked while at the helm of the French schooner Valrosa on a Tuamotuan atoll and lived for a time with the Polynesians. At the age of 21, he commanded another schooner, 50-foot Monsoon, with a Tahitian crew on a journey from Tahiti to Honolulu. Then as First Mate aboard the three-masted barque Carthaginian, he sailed from Hawaii to the United States – booming under San Francisco’s Golden gate Bridge with all seventeen sails set.

Southwards bound again on Andy Wall’s 30-foot sloop Carronade he touched down at Tahiti, then headed for the grey dangers of Cape Horn. A monstrous storm rolled the little craft. She rounded the Cape nine days after Chichester. Carronade became the first yacht ever to cruise the Cape Horn waters – and Des Kearns photographic record is unique.