Dear Editor
What a thoroughly well researched and enjoyable article by John Macfarlane you published in Boating New Zealand on Jack Hargraves (May 2024).
Credit where it is due and thank you for a further insight into the story of one of New Zealand’s great mariners and several of his mates.
I knew Peter Baxter and his family, so his story was very inspirational to me as a younger man. How fantastic an adventure for three very young men to build a boat with all the associated trials and tribulations, abandon normal humdrum of life and just ‘take off’ to explore and eventually circumnavigate the world! What an achievement!
Eventually, I was to achieve my own circumnavigation, but the story of the two Jacks and Peter was always with me. Particularly as we both left from these same southern parts.
Peter was a real character and craftsman, sadly dying of cancer too young, but not, I believe, before converting a lifeboat from the TSS Earnslaw into a lovely and useful sailing vessel…
And, if I remember correctly, Peter told me somewhere mid-Tasman, returning to Bluff, they were knocked down, almost rolling Tuarangi – to a point where the anchor and chain smashed out of the well through the hatch and paid itself all out!
In Pete’s wonderful, colourful language, always laden with expletives, he said “they won the battle that day!”
Thank you again for this article, and [for] evoking many memories for me. Keep up the fantastic work of this terrific magazine!
Alan Forrest,
Riverton.
