Adele Jones

“Oh well, that would be OK I suppose. Why not?”

These were the ten little words that launched Adele Jones into an epic round-the-world sailing adventure with her late husband Rodney; a six-year voyage that would father a thousand adventures and see them visit a host of exotic destinations - from Antigua to Zanzibar.

It all stemmed from a dream. Literally. Rodney told Adele he’d had a vision in which he saw himself stepping out of the door of a North Island bach onto a beach, walking across the sand to a dinghy, and then rowing himself out to a yacht moored nearby.

At the time Rodney owned a successful joinery business in New Plymouth. But no bach, no dinghy and no yacht. He had started the process of transferring the business to his sons so it was the ideal moment to start a North Island road trip to – again, quite literally - find the bach of his dreams.

For some time the couple scoured the North Island coastline for the location of Rodney’s vision. Finally they arrived in Russell, in the Bay of Islands, and immediately fell in love with the place. And, of course, there was the bach of Rodney’s dreams – Cavalli House, a ramshackle dump for sale right at the waterfront, smothered in pink roses!

The next two years were spent renovating Cavalli House and learning to sail in the Bay of Islands. The pair bought a beautiful, well-equipped yacht called Aradonna and earned their open-water sailing stripes in a regatta to Fiji – a lumpy voyage which saw Adele ‘feeding the fish’ almost continuously.

The following year the same regatta took Rodney and Adele to Tonga. But instead of returning back to New Zealand with the rest of the flotilla they “turned left” towards Fiji and New Caledonia. Looking back, Adele says, this was the point at which their great Round the World voyage began. Totally unplanned. Absolutely on the spur of the moment.

“Rodney said to me: ‘we’re not that far from Australia, let’s go there!’ So I just said: ‘Oh well, that would be OK I suppose. Why not?’”

In Adele’s words: “Once we got there we just kept going. Up to the top of Australia, then over the top, then towards Indonesia ... we just kept sailing west. Until we sailed right round the world!”

The pair took their time with their circumnavigation. They flew home every six months or so, “for significant family events; new babies, birthdays, weddings, that sort of thing.”

Aradonna was a lovely boat. She was fitted out with rimu and inside the saloon her mast was turned in the curved, spiral Jacobean style. She boasted two double-berths, one at the stern and one in the bow, and two single quarter-berths. Plenty of room for two people to see the world without stepping on each other’s toes!

Learning Aradonna’s ropes was not without its hairier moments. In the early days she spent an embarrassing amount of time grounded – once at Lautoka in Fiji where she adorned a large brain coral at low tide, and once at the start of the circumnavigation on a sandbank in Cooktown. Emulating James Cook and his holed Endeavour. At least, the couple reckoned, they were in good company!

On another occasion they very nearly ended up stranded on a reef in the English Channel but were warned away by locals just in the nick of time.

“One thing about sailing is that it teaches you to pack away your pride,” Adele says. “You are constantly learning and re-learning – it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing it, the sea and Mother Nature conspire to keep you always on your toes.” 

As well as an object lesson in the need to swallow pride, the voyage taught both Adele and Rodney a huge amount about teamwork and resilience.

“We had only ourselves to rely in for large chunks of time. Some of the experiences we had were very, very frightening but somehow or another you just keep control of yourself; you don’t fall apart, you just have to deal with it.” 

The couple met a huge number of people along the way and made many life-long friends. Adele made extensive notes as they travelled and afterwards wrote a detailed, colourful and engaging memoir called ‘Hello World’. It is littered with references to the people they met, the other vessels they teamed up with and the friendships they formed.

She writes in a style that excites the imagination about the exotic places they explored together – creating memories that for her are as vivid today as they were those many years ago.

For instance, of Zanzibar – the 17th century slave-trade citadel off the east coast of Africa – she writes:

“Zanzibar is everything we expect it to be. It is fascinating, filthy and fiercely hot.... The Old Stone Town is crumbling into disrepair... The shabby, once-whitewashed walls are mildewed or peeling... A merchant, fast asleep beside his bags of salted peanuts, raises a sleepy eyelid before lowering it again. At our approach a Muslim woman, watching from a doorway, shrinks into the shadows beyond... In an upstairs room young boys, dressed in white, chant the Koran. Gloomy entrances open into dreary shops where treasures can be found. Ancient Arabian brass coffee pots, antique clocks and malachite jewellery materialise in the dim light once our eyes adjust.

“The most haunting scene we see that day is the site of the former slave market which was closed in 1873, after centuries of operations. During the middle of the seventeenth century 50,000 slaves passed through every year. We are taken to two underground cells where slaves were held prior to being auctioned. We can only imagine the misery and agony that had preceded our visit to these ghastly places. Averaging the size of a bedroom, one cell held fifty men and another, seventy women and children.”

While both Rodney and Adele cherished their time aboard Aradonna they discovered that they each had totally differing motivations. For Rodney it was the freedom of the wide, open spaces with no land in sight and the buzz of being totally self-reliant. For Adele the euphoria of sailing was in the arrival; the thrill of tying up somewhere new and different, with different history, culture, cuisine and language to immerse herself in.

“The ocean is like a big road on which one can go anywhere, mile upon mile, while night follows day until the destination is reached,” she says. “For me it was a huge enjoyable countdown of weeks, days, hours and minutes until we arrived at some splendid new destination I had only ever dreamed of. What a buzz!”

The voyage also taught the couple, aged 64 and 47 when they set off, that age is no barrier to identifying and reaching new horizons.

Today Adele is happily ensconced in an apartment at Kerikeri Retirement Village. Her family lives near her and they still maintain the beloved property in Russell that started it all – Cavalli House. And Aradonna, the little yacht that could? Well, she now calls Auckland home once again. And, occasionally, Adele and her family get to see her and even sail on her.

Let’s give the last word to Adele, as lifted from her book:

“We were home, safe and grateful to be once again in our own special paradise, surrounded by those whose thoughts and prayers had carried us across the oceans of the world and back again. We are, indeed, two very fortunate people.”