Viv Murray spends a lifetime cruising the Marlborough Sounds
<p>Viv Murray hates the smell of oil skins.</p>
<p>They remind the Marlborough woman of her days spent travelling the Cook Strait on her father's yacht, Vagabond.</p>
<p>"As a kid [my brother and I] used to get wrapped in the old oil skins and sat out in the cockpit," she said. "The smell of oil skins has never appealed to me since."</p>
<p>However, the rough trips were not enough to put Murray off sailing and she and her brother had since inherited the much-loved boat, built in 1926.</p>
<p>"I have grown up with it, my grandfather had it built and when I was 5 [years-old] he handed it on to my father so we started cruising the sounds," she said.</p>
<p>Built in Wellington, Vagabond was kept at the Port Nicholson Yacht Club until about 30 years ago.</p>
<p>Growing up in Wellington, Murray remembered heading across the strait and cruising the Marlborough Sounds each summer with her family.</p>
<p>Her grandparents were living in Kaipapa Bay, in the Queen Charlotte Sound.</p>
<p>"We'd go down to the Pelorus [Sound], the Kenepuru [Sound], and d'Urville Island ... apart from the obligatory Christmas with the grandparents up at the house, we could then go cruising," she says.</p>
<p>It was not unusual to see Murray operating the boat herself, even as a child.</p>
<p>"I took the helm at quite an early age, because my father and brother were more agile than myself so they could jump onto wharves.</p>
<p>"It might have looked weird at the time, a young girl at the helm but the instructions came from the bow," she says.</p>
<p>Since then, Murray had spent years sailing the boat across the strait and around the Sounds, and had sailed other boats to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa.</p>
<p>Most of her skills came from watching and learning on Vagabond.</p>
<p>"It's not scary, the old saying goes that the boat is always stronger than the crew, so you just slow down if it's too rough ... [boats] take most things."</p>
<p>Rough seas did not put Murray's grandfather off sailing either, who took to the Cook Strait even when the ferries were not sailing.</p>
<p>"The weather didn't seem to stop them, they just went. In those days there were no radios or anything, he just went, even if the Tamahine [ferry] couldn't go."</p>
<p>Murray believed her grandfather based the design of Vagabond on boats the Americans were building at the time, having seen similar styles in boating magazines from the era.</p>
<p>She and her brother, Rick Holmes, had made alterations to the boat, including an extension to the cabin, but kept its decor largely the same.</p>
<p>"It's still in the old style ... we have changed a few things but we put in old-fashioned things rather than modernising it," she said.</p>
<p>Vagabond was 11 years off turning 100-years-old, and Murray thought her brother would take it to Wellington to mark the occasion, where other boats of the same era remained.</p>
<p>Written by Kat Duggan. First appeared on <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/" target="_blank"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em><strong>Stuff.co.nz.</strong></em></span></a></p>
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