Winnie
the Pooh Sails the Atlantic Ocean
When I was 20 I ran away to sea; but before I
left I grabbed a few things which I couldn’t bear to leave behind and never see
again. I had only a small, school size backpack and so not much would fit in. I
took just the least amount of clothing so that I could stuff in my treasured
possessions – a green jewellery box inherited from my mother, and a set of pale
blue books won as a prize by her when she was a little girl: the original
Winnie the Pooh books by AA Milne. (Perhaps my selection was subconsciously
decided by the fact that she had just committed suicide, three weeks previously;
my reason I suppose, for running away from home.)
And so,
anyway, after an abrupt departure from his bookshelf Winnie the Pooh went to
sea – ‘in a beautiful pea-green boat;’ though for considerably longer, than ‘a year and a day.’ He set sail with me
for five long years; and with a strange man, very much older than us, in a
little engineless 28ft gaff-rigged sloop, heading out for far distant horizons;
and adventures, many, glorious, and terrifying!
Winnie the Pooh, UNDOUBTEDLY
THE MOST FAMOUS OF ALL BOOK CHARACTERS,
sailed from West Wales to England and from England to Ireland and from Ireland
to Gibraltar and on to West Africa. Surviving shipwreck off the Sahara Desert
coast, and living to tell the tale of his hair-raising subsequent voyage across
the Atlantic in a brand new boat his owner built on a beach in Dakar beneath
seven coconut trees.
Crossing the Atlantic Ocean in 17 days, and at
an average speed of 7 ½ knots, Winnie the Pooh finally reached the Americas,
South and North; ending his days on the canals in Florida. For there, very sadly,
he was inadvertently left behind when his owner ‘jumped ship’ and flew home to
Wales.
One can
only hope that he and his friends remain safely on board, on the vessel’s
bookshelf, and continue to enjoy their seafaring voyages and life on the ocean wave
till the end of their days.
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