Viv Murray spends a lifetime cruising the Marlborough Sounds
Viv Murray hates the smell of oil skins.
They remind the Marlborough woman of her days spent travelling the Cook Strait on her father's yacht, Vagabond.
"As a kid [my brother and I] used to get wrapped in the old oil skins and sat out in the cockpit," she said. "The smell of oil skins has never appealed to me since."
However, the rough trips were not enough to put Murray off sailing and she and her brother had since inherited the much-loved boat, built in 1926.
"I have grown up with it, my grandfather had it built and when I was 5 [years-old] he handed it on to my father so we started cruising the sounds," she said.
Built in Wellington, Vagabond was kept at the Port Nicholson Yacht Club until about 30 years ago.
Growing up in Wellington, Murray remembered heading across the strait and cruising the Marlborough Sounds each summer with her family.
Her grandparents were living in Kaipapa Bay, in the Queen Charlotte Sound.
"We'd go down to the Pelorus [Sound], the Kenepuru [Sound], and d'Urville Island ... apart from the obligatory Christmas with the grandparents up at the house, we could then go cruising," she says.
It was not unusual to see Murray operating the boat herself, even as a child.
"I took the helm at quite an early age, because my father and brother were more agile than myself so they could jump onto wharves.
"It might have looked weird at the time, a young girl at the helm but the instructions came from the bow," she says.
Since then, Murray had spent years sailing the boat across the strait and around the Sounds, and had sailed other boats to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa.
Most of her skills came from watching and learning on Vagabond.
"It's not scary, the old saying goes that the boat is always stronger than the crew, so you just slow down if it's too rough ... [boats] take most things."
Rough seas did not put Murray's grandfather off sailing either, who took to the Cook Strait even when the ferries were not sailing.
"The weather didn't seem to stop them, they just went. In those days there were no radios or anything, he just went, even if the Tamahine [ferry] couldn't go."
Murray believed her grandfather based the design of Vagabond on boats the Americans were building at the time, having seen similar styles in boating magazines from the era.
She and her brother, Rick Holmes, had made alterations to the boat, including an extension to the cabin, but kept its decor largely the same.
"It's still in the old style ... we have changed a few things but we put in old-fashioned things rather than modernising it," she said.
Vagabond was 11 years off turning 100-years-old, and Murray thought her brother would take it to Wellington to mark the occasion, where other boats of the same era remained.
Written by Kat Duggan. First appeared on Stuff.co.nz.
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