"When I was young I was pretty much afraid of everything. I’m not sure when that changed, but Mum tells a story about a day at a family gathering when I was playing with my cousins and my elder sister. They were all holding hands and jumping into a swimming pool, and Mum was watching me closely because I was afraid of water and couldn’t swim. I was five years old."
The story begins on a note of supreme irony. The author/protagonist/narrator admits to being afraid of going into the water to swim as a child. Of course, the book will proceed to detail the narrative of this same young girl having grown into a teenager attempting to sail around the world all by herself. Few opening lines begin on a note of such profound irony. This opening not only informs the reader of Jessica’s early fear of water, it also goes on to reveal how she decided to confront that fear head-on by joining family members in a game in which they all held hands and jumped into a pool together. Thus, the opening imagery of the novel not only illustrates the mindset of a young girl determined to overcome her fears, but also foreshadows the significant part that family support and unity will play in developing her ambition to follow through on a crazy dream of solo circumnavigation barely more than ten years after this incident occurred.
"Some days I’m all motivated and really get into maintenance and cleaning. Some days I hardly look up from the book I’m reading. Sometimes I’ll be really chatty, make a few phone calls and spend lots of time sending emails, then there are the days on end when hardly anyone hears from me. One day I might sleep lots and the next hardly at all. Sometimes I'll really get into my cooking and sometimes I survive on Cup a Soup and crackers. I don’t even write in my diary regularly, often skipping a few days then making up for it by writing lots all at once. I suppose you could call me a little random! But more than anything, the weather has the final say and takes priority over everything else."
The narrative voice of the book is split into two types. One is a narrative recounting after the event and the other is the more immediate reaction and reflections Jessica wrote in her log of the trip. The obvious choice in writing a book about the trip would seem to be the publication of the log as is with perhaps a introductory and epilogue written after the fact. This excerpt from a much longer entry on March 5, 2010 reveals the folly of that reasoning. While the publication of the journal written during the voyage may have worked well for Christopher Columbus, Jessica is not sailing into uncharted waters nor is she equipped with the education, experience, fear or wonder that helps to make the detailed daily descriptions of Columbus such fascinating reading. The plain fact of the matter is that most days—with the notable exceptions dealing with inclement weather—tend to be pretty much just a slightly altered version of the day before and the day after when sailing around the world. That even the sailor herself recognizes the potentially mind-numbing experience of relying solely upon log entries to relate the narrative is expressed here in her confession to often going days without making an entry.
“We don’t believe she’s been making her own PR decisions. We don’t believe she decided her route. People think we’re criticizing Jessica. We’re not. We’re criticizing her management.”
A running subplot of sorts throughout the book is the persistent criticism of Jessica making the attempt in the first place. The criticism starts out targeting her age, insisting that she was too young to be allowed to do something as dangerous trying to sail around the world all alone. Naturally, this criticism quickly veered into misogyny as the argument focused less on her age than her gender. These two combined opened the pathway for the more serious accusations that she simply could not have gained the experience necessary to do what she intended to do. But that all began even before her first day alone at sea. Once she was out of Sydney Harbor and officially set on her course, the critique does not stop but merely shifts focus. By the time she has made it almost all the way back home, criticism turns into accusations: she wasn’t actually alone, someone else writing her daily logs, she had violated the rules of solo circumnavigation by receiving outside assistance, and even that she had stopped to enjoy a few days at a bed and breakfast in Tasmania. With the inclusion of this quote from Kothe, Jessica sums up what the subtext of all this criticism meant to her. Whether intended to be directed toward her or not, ultimately what all of it came down to was the suggestion that she was not ultimately in control of her own decision to sail around the world. Regardless of the specific topic of the criticism, ultimately what it was all saying was that a young woman could not possibly do what she had done without just as much help after launching her boat from the harbor as she readily admits to receiving up to that point. All available evidence suggests that Jessica Watson was her management.
