I owe more than I can say to the many people who became part of the Auk and her voyage during 2003. It was both a privilege and a huge pleasure to be with and work with the team of resourceful, energetic, warm and generous people who made the Channel 4/ National Geographic series for Keo Films and ushered the Auk along her way. They were: Directors: Lucy Sandys-Winsch, Nick Read, Will Anderson, Andrew Palmer and Ben Roy; Producers: Ben Roy and Jacky Houdret; Camera: Steve Standen, Luke Cardiff, Richard Hill and Johann Perry; Sound: Ian Maclagan, Paul Paragon, Simon Farmer, and Godfrey Kirby; Editors: Simon Beeley and Peter Cartwright; and in the Keo office: Jon Hubbard, Katherine Perry, Claire Hamilton, Toyin Ogunbiyi and Ewan Fletcher.
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I would like especially to thank Will Anderson, Zam Baring and Andrew Palmer for their friendship, for sticking with the idea long after all others would have dropped it and for shepherding me so carefully along so many dodgy paths.
Susan Watt at HarperCollins has been my guide and mentor for many years, for which I will always remainenormously grateful. My agent Caroline Dawnay at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, and her assistant Alex Elam, continue to do everything any author could hope for, for which, as ever, all thanks.
My heartfelt love and thanks to George Fairhurst, the Auk’s skipper, for putting up with me for a year, for taking the Auk where no other skipper would have dared, for doing every single thing that was asked of him in the most difficult circumstances, for the warmth of his friendship and for taking the candour of these pages in the spirit in which they were intended.
Above all, my love and gratitude to Sarah Raven, whose own love does not alter when it alteration finds.