A Sea Apart

His wife, photographer Marie Jordan, reflects on a life lived between harbors.

PEOPLE WHO KNEW EDDIE always asked the same thing. How did a man with that much energy, who couldn't sit still through a meal, ever find peace on a boat?

He didn't, is the honest answer. He never went for peace. He went for the freedom of it. The open water gave him as much room as he wanted, and Eddie wanted a great deal of room.

He'd spent his whole life in the noise of motor racing, cameras in his face, people forever wanting a piece of him. The boat was the one part of his world that none of that could reach. Not because it was quiet. Eddie never wanted quiet. But out there he answered to nobody except the wind, and he loved not knowing what the next harbor would bring. He chased that the way he chased everything, with both hands and a grin.

We sailed the same water but were rarely on the same voyage. Eddie was drawn to the noise of a place. The minute we tied up somewhere new he was gone, off down the quay, sniffing out the best restaurant or falling into conversation with some fisherman or waiter who'd be a friend for life by the end of the night. He wanted to know who ran the place, what they ate, where the locals went once the tourists had gone to bed.

I was the opposite. While Eddie was charming a harbor master, I'd slip off with my camera to find the quiet. I came to photography late, although the curiosity was there long before the camera. My daughter gave me a camera about thirteen years ago and it changed how I saw everywhere we went.

I'd always been interested in people and places, in the way a culture gives itself away if you watch it long enough. The camera just gave me somewhere to put all that.

So, Eddie went looking for the life of a place, and I went looking for its stillness. The light on the water at six in the morning. A hillside before the day got loud. The character of a town that has nothing to do with its restaurants.

Share a boat with someone for years and you can't help seeing through their eyes a little. Eddie would drag me into some deafening quayside place I'd never have picked, and it would turn out to be the best night of the trip. I'd make him climb a headland at dawn for a photograph, and he'd grumble the whole way up and then go quiet at the top, which for Eddie was close to a miracle. We handed each other the bits of the journey we'd each have missed alone. I used to think we were too different. In the end the difference was the best of it.

Nowhere showed the gap between us more plainly than Svalbard, where we sailed in 2022. For me it was heaven. A fortnight of ice and extraordinary light, almost nobody about, the kind of place where I'd forget to put the camera down. For Eddie it was an adjustment. I'd warned him before we left.

"You do realize there's no phone reception for two weeks?"

"Yeah, yeah," he said, the way he said "yeah, yeah" to anything he hadn't actually heard.

On the second day he looked up at me, genuinely shocked. There's really no reception? He had the face of a small boy whose favorite toy has been taken away. He sulked for a bit, then got on with the program. He managed it. But he had to brake very hard to do it.

He was as competitive on the water as he'd been on the track. I lost count of the regattas where he stood at the rail shaking his fist at some rival who'd pipped us at the line, outraged, as if he'd been robbed. Ten minutes later he'd have his arm round the same skipper, buying the drinks. He couldn't bear to lose. He also couldn't stay cross with anyone for longer than it took to pour a glass.

The biggest of all our journeys was the Oyster World Rally. We took an Oyster called "Lush" right around the world, sixteen months and tens of thousands of miles, starting with a cannon fired over the harbor at Antigua and going on through the Panama Canal and out into the Pacific. It was a huge thing to take on, even for Eddie, and he threw himself at it. He used to say he had more air miles than he could count, but that sailing round the world would be the adventure of the lot. He wasn't wrong.

And, of course, he couldn't just sail round the world quietly. He had to bring the party with him. He was never happier than with a pair of drumsticks in his hands, and the night before the start he would play an impromptu gig on the dock, the way he always did. Wherever we anchored, the music and the singing and the general chaos were never far behind. For Eddie the sailing and the music were the same thing. Both were freedom. Both were an excuse to get people together and see what happened.

In recent years he wanted something different from the sea. He'd had bigger boats with full crews, but what he really wanted was to feel a boat under his own hands, to stand at the wheel and sail her himself. He bought an Oyster 495, named her Tuga, small enough that he was quite sure he could manage her on his own. The model had just been named European Yacht of the Year, and Eddie being Eddie, he'd ordered the most distinctive-looking version anyone had seen. He was enormously proud of her.

Which is where he and I had a slight disagreement.

His plan to sail Tuga himself did not, in his head, include the small matter of safety. I knew my husband better than anyone, and I had no illusions about him. He treated risk as an inconvenience invented by more cautious people. We negotiated, the way one always did with Eddie, and in the end, we settled on a captain. I've been very clear ever since about why I dug my heels in. I was not going to sail with Eddie alone on a yacht. He'd take risks unnecessarily. That's not a complaint, it's just a fact, and anyone who read this. The captain, for what it's worth, became one of the family. They all did, those who spent any time around Eddie.

Looking back, the boats and the harbors run together now. What's left is simpler than all of it. The sea gave us a life hardly anyone gets to have. It gave Eddie a freedom that could keep up with him, and it gave me time with a camera and time on my own.

Mostly it gave us each other, for long stretches, far from everything, when it was just the two of us and the water and whatever was over the horizon. People call a boat an escape. Ours never was. It was the truest version of our life, the place where Eddie was most himself and where I could actually hear myself think. Same sea, two completely different things to look at, and it made the view better for both of us.

These days I split my time between Cape Town and Monaco, about as different as two places can be. The sea is one of the few things they share. I swim every day, wherever I am. It's become my own ritual, the thread that runs through everything. Eddie took to the sea by setting sail across it. I just get in.

I'm still out with the camera at six most mornings, when the light comes up clean over a quiet harbor. And every time, I half expect to hear him somewhere already, finding the life in a place where I'd only seen the beauty.

I expect I always will.

By Marie Jordan