1. What preparations were made by the narrator before their round the world voyage?

They had been preparing for the past 16 years, spending all their leisure time honing their seafaring skills in British waters in lieu of their round the world voyage. Their boat, the Wavewalker, was a 23 metre, 30 ton wooden-hulled beauty which had been professionally built and they had spent months fitting it out and testing it in the roughest weather possible. The family also took on two crewmen, American Larry Vigil and Swiss Herb Seigler to help them tackle one of the world's roughest seas,the southern Indian Ocean.