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june/july 2018cruisingworld.comsailed continuously by any
sailor unassisted and alone;
it took 678 days at sea and
earned Sanders an Order of
the British Empire (OBE)
and the coveted Blue Water
Medal from the Cruising Club
of America. While working
in Perth a few years ago, I
visited that record-breaking
boat, a 46 -foot Curran sloop
named Parry Endeavour, in the
Western Australian Maritime
Museum. Along with the
1983 America’s Cup winner,
Australia II, it’s one of the
museum’s prized exhibits.
“This trip is my swan
song,” he said while sitting
below aboard Perie Banou II. A
confi rmed bachelor, he’s close
to his brother, Colin, whom he
stays with when ashore. Like
some of the other solo sailors
I’ve met, such as six-timecircumnavigator Webb
Chiles, I got the impression
that shore time for Sanders
serves as a rather mundane
gap between sea time. Unlike
Chiles, who has been married
six times, the sea is perhaps a
steadier mistress for Sanders,
one that takes him to favorite
ports such as the British Virgin
Islands and, on this voyage,
New Caledonia.
Sanders’ S&S 39 was built
in Sydney in 1971. “It’s the
second-stiffest boat in the
whole of Western Australia,
according to the stats,” he
said. “The lead keel weighs
nearly half of the boat.” It’s
taken a few tumbles over the
years. “She went right over
once, but I held on, sitting on
the cabin sole, and she righted
herself fairly easily,” he said.
Walking around the deck,
I noticed that most fi ttings,
like the huge hinges on the
main skylight, were oversize.
“It can open both ways,”
he said. Sanders still fondly
recalls his fi rst seagoing yacht,
a Sparkman & Stephens 34
called Perie Banou, the name of
a fairy in the book The Arabian
Nights, which his mother —
the well-known Western
Australian writer Dorothy
Lucy McClemans — was fond
of (under the pseudonym Lucy
Walker, she wrote 42 books).
She, along with his father, an
academic, encouraged Sanders’
sailing, and by the age of 14,
with his brother and sister,
Lucy-Anne, he owned his fi rst
sailboat. His late mother’s
estate has helped him fulfi ll his
sailing dreams. “She left me a
small legacy, which works out
like a pension and has given
me a bit of money to go on
with,” he said.
Perie Banou II has a fairly
conventional Bermudan rig
with a roller-furling headsail
and slab reefi ng on the
mainsail, but the deck-stepped
spar also has a tabernacle for
raising and lowering. Sanders
runs downwind under the
main alone, on a preventer,
with the headsail furled.
When I asked about the twin
spinnaker poles lashed to the
gunwales, he said, “On other
trips I’ve run with twin head-Jon Sanders arrived in
Sydney on his current cir-
cumnavigation aboard his
S&S 39, Perie Banou II
(above). He completed his
record-setting triple circum-
navigation on the 46-foot
Parry Endeavour (middle).
The Aussie has spent count-
less hours at his cluttered
nav station (below).KEVIN GREEN (TOP AND BOTTOM), COURTESY OF JON SANDERS