Only woman on ketch

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32561, 22 March 1971, Page 6

Only woman on ketch

In every adventurer’s heart is the dream of life on the main, visits to all sorts of exotic ports and generally answering adventure’s call.

For a young Christchurch woman. Miss Ruth Hobday, the dream became a reality. Miss Hobday was the only girl in a crew of ten who left Wellington in June, 1969, to sail around the Pacific. “I went as a nurse, because I had been a nurse in the Navy, a cook, because I had done training as a chef, and as a forward hand,” she said yesterday. 1 From Wellington, the ketch went to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, Tahiti, French Polynesia, Samoa, Tonga, back to die Cooks, and to Fiji. The whole trip took a year.

“It was terrific really because shipboard life was so free. However, there were problems for a girl. You had to wear your hair short because of the salt, and sleep in what you wore during the day, whether it was wet or dry. I lived in jeans and the skin on my hands and feet was terrifically hard and calloused. A girl can become

very masculine living such a life.” The crew landed at all the islands and lived with the people for two to three months, learning the customs and absorbing the way of life. “One or two islands hadn’t seen white people for a few years and here we got really royal treatment. The' people lived on coconuts and fish so we gave them food and traded things like paint, rope and combs. I traded two pairs of pants and a bra for a turtle back,” said Miss Hobday. The cruise ended in July last year in Australia, where

Miss Habday has lived for 18 months, completing her full apprenticeship as a chef while working as second cook in a Canberra hotel. She is at present spending two weeks in Christchurch at her parents’ home at 44 Lyndon Street, Riccarton, before leaving for Rabaul, New Guinea, to work in a hotel as a chef.