Sailing on a yacht where you can see nothing but the sea and the horizon, and without another boat in sight, gives me a great feeling of freedom. Add to that standing naked under the sun with a gentle breeze blowing over your body; that is total freedom.

After arriving home from the Whitsunday cruise and talking it over with my wife, I wanted to do one last cruise before giving up the sailing lifestyle that I loved and joining her on land.

Within a couple of hours of reactivating my profile with findacrew.com, I started receiving applications and I emailed a prepared reply, stating that I was a nudist and whoever came along would be expected to comply. Again I was either ignored or received a short answer such as ‘weirdo’ or ‘pervert’, but mostly they did not reply. After the previous year of much the same treatment I didn’t give up hope as I still had plenty of time before departure.

A few weeks later I received an application from a Kiwi lady who said she had over 40,000 nautical miles experience on all kinds of boats, small monohulls to larger multihulls - catamarans and trimarans - and had just arrived back from a passage through the South Pacific that took five months. I sent off my prepared email and the reply was promising as she said that she had spent time on many ‘nude boats’, so there was no issue about that but there were still other things to work out.

I received another interesting application from the USA, a lady who ran a cattle property. She had done a lot of sailing along the American coast so had some experience. She had been to Australia before on business but was interested in seeing the far north from the sea. She didn’t seem to be upset about me being nude but said that she had never done anything like that before, although she may be interested in seeing what it was like. Things started looking better when I was contacted by another American lady who owned her own yacht but didn’t want to sail all the way to Australia by herself.

She had never been nude on her own yacht but had talked about it with other sailors and it seemed to be a good idea because of the water issue (if you don’t wear clothes then you don’t have to wash them, thereby saving precious water). She added that where she came from it was too cold to sail anywhere without clothes. She was also extremely interested in seeing the part of Australia where I would be sailing and wanted to know more about me and my yacht.

Then I was contacted by a lady who stated that she was 28 years old and had a 13 year old daughter who always travelled with her, and she wanted to know more. There were some more contacts from other ladies, who were interested in the nude lifestyle and were really interested in the cruise, but only for a short term. They were also inquiring if there was any possibility of spending up to two months with me. I had to decline all of the short term inquiries as it would be too hard to change over crews and I did not want to be put on a time line. In the past I have found that whenever you have to be somewhere at a specified time then something usually goes wrong - and it is nearly always the weather - and trying to punch through huge waves and getting pounded around tends to take the enjoyment out of any sailing adventure. On top of that, after Cooktown the area is very remote and there would be no place where we could meet prospective crew members.

Several enquiries were received from people in developing countries, who immediately wanted passages paid and visas supplied to allow entry into Australia. I declined all of them. It should be understood that most people looking to cruise on a pleasure boat are prepared to find their own way to and from the boat, and some yachts insist that the crew/ passenger contribute to the expenses of the boat. There are all types of criteria for matching different boats with crews but most pleasure cruisers do not pay any wages, although they usually supply food, unless stipulated otherwise.