Sailing through the South China Sea

During Covid, when the world folded in on itself, we went looking for stories that hadn’t. A cousin in a harbour bar pointed us towards a yellow hull and said, “If it’s a story you want, take the dinghy.” We did. Riley Whitelum hauled us aboard with a rope-salted, sun-warm hand, one steady yank and a booming “g’day, mate”, his beach hat frayed to cheerful ribbons. From the galley came a second welcome: Elayna Carausu’s smile arrived before she did, a bottle passed up with the kind of ease that tells you you’re already among friends.

A flash of tow-blond at the jib: Lenny, skinny, fearless, and absolutely certain we needed to see his latest knots. That became our ritual. Every reunion began with a knot demonstration and ended with the feeling that time on water bends in kinder directions.

Five years later we stepped aboard again, this time to follow them through the South China Sea and the Sulu Sea, threading a month across the islands of the Philippines. The new boat, a bright yellow carbon-fibre trimaran, moved like an idea that couldn’t wait to be tried. Bunks were few, so we slept on deck. Most nights were a quiet orchestra: halyards ticking the mast, a hinge offering its soft creak somewhere aft, gentle snores braided with the slap of water on hull. Heat eased, stars brightened, and every hour or so a meteor stitched a white seam across the dark. When rain arrived without warning, we scrambled laughing into the galley, making room beside Riley and baby Darwin, the same baby who’d been a curve of promise the first time we met.

Mornings staged their slow theatre. The sea wore all its blues before agreeing to gold. Lenny briefed Darwin on the day’s knot plan, serious business for small hands. Elayna brewed coffee salt and suncream and coffee make a smell that belongs to boats and Riley checked the weather, draped in his favourite “toga”: a white towel, tied-back hair, a handlebar moustache that deserves its own screen credit. He looked like he’d been captain for several centuries and would happily do a few more.

Days settled into their boat logic: a little music, pages turned, small repairs that felt like rituals. Then the camera work began. Shooting was the joy, reef shelves dropping away like theatre stages, limestone shoulders, village shallows where children waved us in. We dived with seasoned freedivers; most of us hovered at twenty metres or less, swapping camera and breath, while the kids negotiated.. Again, why they could not follow. Trust filled the gaps: trust in the water, in each other, in the line that kept the tender within reach and the day on the right side of safe.

"An unlikely tale of serendipity, collaboration, and achievement."

The harder part was finishing. A deck is a living floor; it never sits still for long. One hundred degrees and no A/C makes its own weather inside your head. Memory cards stacked like charms against bad luck. A laptop balanced against the roll, a bead of sweat chasing your wrist while you trim a scene and the boat nudges you two frames sideways. When the cut needed quiet, we’d be dropped ashore, lock ourselves in a guesthouse humming with a tired fan, and come up for air at dusk, salt still on the shoulders, minds still at sea.

Storm cells teased the horizon most afternoons, bruised anvils that flashed and faded. Sometimes we altered course; sometimes we trusted the space between. In far coves we found small economies and quick kindness, mangoes traded for batteries, prop fixes paid with sunscreen and a story. Ellie, the nanny from near Liverpool, stitched a thread of “home” through everything; the boys adored her, and so did we.

Somewhere between Tubbataha and a scatter of names I still can’t pronounce properly, the film we thought we were making changed shape. It wasn’t just an app chapter or even a travel log. It was a map of patience and improvisation: how you keep building a life while the life keeps moving, children grow, weather turns, diesel dips and returns, and the next anchorage is always just beyond the last good idea.

We filmed the work, yes. But we also filmed what holds work together: Elayna’s grin mid-squall; the way Riley counts the sea under his breath; Lenny’s triumph when a knot sits just so; Darwin asleep in a coil of line, as if the rope had been made to cradle exactly that small shape. The camera stopped being a tool and turned into a bridge, between us and them, between the day and the memory of it, between the stubbornness it takes to keep going and the grace that lets you enjoy it.

At night the boat spoke in its old language, creaks, ticks, a soft tap of something somewhere finding its place. The water lapped like a quiet audience. Someone snored, someone laughed in their sleep. If you’ve ever dozed on deck you know the feeling: you are held, not by walls, but by habit and horizon. You drift a little and never fall.

We left with hard drives, a sunburn that turned to freckles, and a sense that friendship can be built from the smallest materials: a warm hand hauling you aboard; a child insisting you admire a knot; a coffee passed up from a galley; the collective shrug and grin when rain makes comedians of everyone. The film we brought home does its job, there’s craft in the cut and care in the sound and light, but the thing that lingers isn’t technical. It’s the friendship. It’s knowing that, for a month, we lived inside a family’s moving circumference and were welcomed as if we’d always been there.

If you ask what we learned, it’s this: the good stories don’t need fanfare. They need time, and weather, and the ordinary bravery of people looking after one another. They need a deck that rocks just enough to remind you you’re afloat. They need a rope, a hand, a hello. And they need a camera held by someone who understands that the best part of recording a life is being invited to share it.