Travels with my Sea Captain

About the Book

FROM HOLLYWOOD TO THE HIGH SEAS

A chance encounter in Los Angeles airport with a Swedish Sea Captain and Jill left the movie business and was swept out to sea. From the glamour of Hollywood to life on board a rough cargo ship to playing Mother Goose on a remote Scottish farm, TRAVELS WITH MY SEA CAPTAIN is full of stories about the Captain and his international crew of characters, the many ports as Jill found herself travelling all over the world, life in the glen and how love can really change everything.

Travels With My Sea Captain by Jill Vedebrand

A warm, humorous account of one woman's tempestuous affair and marriage to a fiery Swedish sea captain. After meeting by chance in Los Angeles airport, Jill and Tomas fell in love and she decided to join him on some of his voyages to exotic locations including Japan, Singapore, Cuba, South America, India and Russia.

There is no shortage of drama as she paints a vivid picture of months spent aboard a ship where she was often the only female. At times resented by the crew, she also often adopted the role of agony aunt and compassionately recounts the hardship endured by men who can spend several years away from their families. There are stories of drunken cooks, surly engineers, brutal fights, macho wrestling competitions, and frantic shore searches for men who had gone missing in the local brothels. The physical aspect of being on board ship also poses problems as she struggles to adapt to the confined spaces, isolation of the open ocean and the violent weather they encounter.

The often stunning and sometimes frightening places she visited during her time at sea are colourfully portrayed and she has a knack for bringing to life the sights, smells and atmosphere.

Intertwined with the tales of her sea voyages are stories of Jill and Tomas' home life in rural Scotland. They buy a farm and there are accounts of their battles to restore the property and about their menagerie of ducks and pets. In these parts the story reminded me a little of James Herriot or Lillian Beckwith's stories about life in the Hebrides and I think it would have great appeal to these markets.

Part travelogue, part humorous account of life in the wilds of Scotland, this is an engaging, romantic, very human story.

SENIOR EDITOR

About the Author

Jill Vedebrand was born in London but spent many years working in the film business as a Production Manager and Line Producer in Hollywood, USA, beginning with Roger Corman and continuing with other independent companies in a variety of feature films starring Ron Howard, Oliver Reed, David Carradine, Brad Davis, George Kennedy and many others. In the middle of her career, she met a Swedish sea captain and made the choice to join him at sea, where she was to spend the next ten years on a variety of cargo ships and oil tankers. Jill discovered that life at sea had quite a lot in common with the film business.

"When you work on a film set or on a ship, it's generally considered that you are living a very glamorous life. It can be, as in both situations you have extraordinary experiences and see wonderful places, but there will be many days and nights with little rest or sleep and you will constantly be driven to mental and physical extremes- financial decisions are made by others, hundreds of miles away, arriving out of the blue by telex or e-mail, changing the port of call, cutting the art budget in half, leaving the crew to make it work, somehow. Your family and old friends seem to be living on another planet, you cannot relate to any news that they tell you. You miss them, you try to sound interested but their world is so removed from yours. People in the film business are fond of saying, 'Hey, the train has left the station,' too late to change your mind, get on with it, don't think about anything else but the job. When the ship leaves port it's the same for the sailors. In our fast paced automatic world, where cargo in unloaded in hours not days, crews have few opportunities to fulfil what is suspected or envied by those ashore, and on a film you have to be obsessed with the detail to ensure nothing goes wrong, if you relax, then it surely will. The good part, the most fun, is feeling one of the team; you share it all with your companions in arms, your shipmates. At sea, if you are not crew, you are listed, as I was, as a 'supernumerary or in excess to requirements, but there are compensations. There was a hammock slung up on deck in the sunshine, a book to read out on the bridge wing, a typewriter in the spare cabin with no telephones ringing, the changing beauty of the sea and sky, the cast of friendly characters on board and the captain, always a complete entertainment in himself."

When Jill and Tomas were not at sea they lived on a small farm in a remote Scottish glen where they kept geese, ducks and chickens, dug a pond, planted trees, cut endless grass and patched up the old stone farmhouse.

Tomas is now a Deep Sea Pilot working in the English Channel and the North Sea. In addition to TRAVELS WITH MY SEA CAPTAIN, Jill has written a novel, TWO SAILORS, a dramatic sea story set in the 1950s.