I think everybody who sails has vividly imagined some variation of this nightmare: you leave a crew member alone on deck for a while to catch some sleep below, and when you come back on deck you find your crew is missing. Disappeared, with no clue what happened to them. So it was in reality for poor Pete Hill, who departed Durban, South Africa, bound for Madagascar on Thursday with his wife Carly aboard their 33-foot junk-rigged wood-epoxy catamaran Oryx. Hill reportedly went below for a nap at some point on Friday afternoon, while the boat was still just 6 miles off the South African coast, and when he awoke Carly was gone. After a fruitless two-day search by South African authorities, Carly Hill, age 58, is now presumed to be dead.
Pete Hill, now age 65, has been a full-time live-aboard bluewater cruiser for all his adult life and has long been an avid proponent of junk rigs. He built his latest boat, a modified KD 860 design by Bernd Kohler, with Carly’s help in England during 2012 and since then the two of them have cruised in the boat across the Atlantic to Brazil via the Canaries and Cape Verdes and from there to South Africa.
Carly, a native of South Africa, had chronicled their adventures on both her Facebook page and on her blog.
Oryx was hauled out in South Africa for a refit, her first since being launched in 2012, whereupon it was discovered that one keel, unbeknownst to Pete and Carly, had gone missing
Pete works on fabricating a new keel
Carly works at sprucing up the interior
Pete first gained notoriety as a cruiser sailing his junk-rigged Jay Benford-designed dory Badger with his then-wife Annie Hill during the 1980s and early 1990s. Annie’s most excellent book, Voyaging On A Small Income (1993), laid out the essentials of their low-budget cruising lifestyle and philosophy and is considered a classic by cruising literature cognoscenti. Pete and Annie went their separate ways after Pete started in on his next self-built boat, the biplane-rigged catamaran China Moon, and the couple divorced in 2001.
Badger under sail
China Moon under sail, with Pete Hill at the helm
Oryx, like China Moon, carries a biplane junk rig and is seen here with Carly on the helm and Pete on deck
Another view of Oryx under sail. Pete seems to have developed his own unique variation of a junk rig
I’ve never met Pete Hill, but I have long admired him, and my heart goes out to him now. And also to Carly’s family. What an awful tragedy.
We have to assume, of course, that Carly somehow fell overboard, and I know there are many out there right now who are clucking their tongues thinking she should have been clipped in wearing a harness. But we’ll never know if that really would have made a difference here. So let’s save the should-you-constantly-wear-a-harness debate for another time and focus instead on simply honoring the loss of Carly.