Beyond the sea

Sarah-Jane Blake. Photo / Martin Sykes

Sucked into the tumult of a hurricane while sailing on Lion New Zealand — the grand old maxi yacht her father, Sir Peter, sailed around the world when she was barely 2 — Sarah-Jane Blake finally understands what it is that her dad saw in the sea.

Crewing the boat on its return voyage from the Auckland-Noumea race last month, hunkering down against 80 knot winds and waves like multi-storey carparks, Sarah-Jane had no sleep for 96 hours and her automatic responses were guided by both nature and nurture. Harnessed to the boat that whipped from side to side, she was pitched overboard — and underwater — for a terrifying moment at the zenith of the storm.

But through the tempest, she felt happy, calm and "alive", and, for the first time, aware of the magnificence and power of the ocean which so enthralled her late father. "It was so therapeutic — I felt like I saw something that my dad saw. We were in nearly survival mode, just living on adrenalin. The beauty and the power of the sea that I saw ... that really helped me to see what my dad thought about," she says, safely back on land. "I also realised he was much crazier than I thought."

She is not a sailor. Now 26, she is, like her mother Pippa, an artist — a set and costume designer, and actor. Yet, faced with her own mortality on Lion New Zealand, nature kicked in. Sarah-Jane was in the cockpit when the yacht was knocked down — broaching in the gales — and although she was in a harness, she and another sailor were thrown overboard. "I went underwater and it felt like ages, but it was probably 10 seconds. As I went under I thought that was it. But then I was thinking 'what should I do next?' — I'm really happy that I thought that — I should unclip my harness, swim under the boat. But then it righted itself and we came back up, and just sat there with our eyes wide open. I felt really alive."

It was the first time Sarah-Jane had sailed on the 24m Lion since she was a baby. In 1985, she made the aluminium sloop's delivery voyage from New Zealand to England with her parents and 700 disposable nappies. From that journey — an epic one for a toddler — nurture came into play 24 years on. When she and Pippa were banished below decks during rough weather for the first three weeks of Lion's initial delivery trip, a merchant navy captain in the crew would play a ukulele to the little girl to keep her entertained.

This time she instinctively took her own ukulele on board and "I'd play it when we were changing sails, to calm everyone down." When she needed solace, she headed for the bow, where she as a toddler she sat in a plastic red bathtub, serving bathwater tea to grizzled seamen. "I felt happy up there," she says.

Sir Peter later wrote about that journey: "To see the delight on her face with every new experience was enchanting ... I certainly would not have wanted to do the trip without SJ and clearly the experience had done much for her." The snowy-haired tot played among seals on the Galapagos Islands, swam in the Gatun Lakes in the Panama Canal and celebrated her second birthday on the way to Easter Island, with a cake, candles and a cardboard Mickey Mouse hat.

Today, sitting in the Waterfront Cafe on the edge of Auckland's Viaduct Basin that Sir Peter Blake helped transform, she is the image of her mother at her age — slight, blond and carefree — but with her father's mischievous blue eyes and grin. Behind her, construction workers are finishing off the imposing new wing of the New Zealand Maritime Museum which will house the Blue Water, Black Magic exhibition, a tribute to Sir Peter's life as a sailor, leader and environmentalist.

His daughter has left behind family and work in England to help create the $9 million exhibition, which opens permanently in December. Among her tasks has been to bring to life, through animated models she has made herself, the tales of Fifi the Flea, the tiny superhero dreamed up by Sir Peter for Sarah-Jane and her younger brother James' bedtime stories.

"When he died I really wanted to remember the story, because it would help me remember ..." Sarah-Jane trails off. Working on this exhibition, she admits, "feels a little strange but it's design work and it's really good to immerse myself and get over a bit more grief. I'm happy to be here."

Sarah-Jane was 18, studying drama at Bristol University in England, when her father was shot dead by ratos de agua — river bandits — on board Seamaster, his "blakexpeditions" vessel, at the mouth of the Amazon River in December 2001. She had spent time with him onboard, delivering Seamaster from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro a few months earlier. She, Pippa and James were to have joined him in the Caribbean the following Christmas before he embarked on his next quest, navigating the Northwest Passage.

In the last year, it's become evident Sarah-Jane has inherited his yearning for adventure. "In November I got really itchy feet. I'd been hanging around England doing odd jobs, but I wanted to have an adventure and sort myself out," she says. She headed to Nepal, first working in an orphanage with the Umbrella Foundation — which rescues impoverished Nepali children and gives them shelter, education and medical attention — before teaching at an affluent international school. "I was teaching Hamlet to 12-year-olds — it was so surreal," she laughs. "I'm so glad that I worked at the orphanage first, because the juxtaposition of those two institutions in Kathmandu was amazing."

Then she spent a month travelling through India on buses and trains with three young Frenchmen she met while they fixed their bicycles in Nepal — "they didn't speak very good English but they looked quite wild, like they'd be great travelling partners" — and visited Thailand and Cambodia, before a call came from New Zealand.

Sticky Pictures, the Wellington independent film and television production company whose short film Six Dollar Fifty Man received special distinction at Cannes this year, had been commissioned to produce the centrepiece documentary for Blue Water, Black Magic.

"When they went over to see Mum in Emsworth, she told them about Fifi the Flea, and they wanted me to make an animated movie of the story for the documentary. It's about a flea, a sheepdog named Henry and a policeman, and Fifi would always save the day. She wore polka dot bikinis and carried an umbrella which was her secret weapon," Sarah-Jane says. "So I spent the first month here making models out of clay and loads of card and paper. It's very low budget with a low-fi feel about it. I had to remember what Dad would have said, and my brother helped to remember. It was a really good process; it was really cool."

Now she's helping Wellington-based Workshop e, a company that creates exhibitions for museums and galleries throughout the country, to piece together her father's life to share with the public. She's installing lights and cabinets, and painting graphics on the walls. "It's going to have to be neat. And I'm not very neat," she giggles.

She has all the credentials: after graduating from a four-year Bachelor of Arts degree in arts and drama at Bristol, she did the intensive one-year Motley Theatre Design course in London, specialising in set and costume design. It ended with an exhibition of her work at the National Theatre. Sarah-Jane admits she didn't enjoy the organisational stress of working on month-long theatre contracts or the reality of having to move a prop from one side of London to the other. So she headed to Naples with friends who had a theatre company, where they "put on a big, crazy performance in an abandoned church. That was more my thing, conventional theatre not so much."

Back in London, she worked with Punchdrunk, a prominent theatre company fusing live performance, music and large-scale installation art, setting up in deserted industrial warehouses or abandoned Victorian schools. During her theatre design course, she made 1:25 scale models of houses, with miniature furniture: "I hated it, but now I can't stop." Even in Auckland, she continues to make the diminutive artworks inside boxes from bits and pieces she salvages. "It's not a passion, more like an obsession," she says. "I love telling stories through lots of different objects found around me. As a family sailing around all the time, stuck on a boat with no TV, we told stories of caves and smugglers."

On board Lion New Zealand to Noumea and back, there were plenty of tall stories told. "I really liked being cold, and wet and hanging out with funny people, telling stories and singing silly songs in the middle of the sea. I made good friends on that boat. That's what I really loved about it," she says.

Among those friends is Lion New Zealand skipper Alistair Moore, who was part of the Seamaster crew on the Amazon. Now she's in her father's home waters, Sarah-Jane plans more seafaring. "I'm not a great sailor, but I like hanging around with sailors; it's the gruff conversation I like. It feels really nice. My mother is probably a bit horrified. She says she's proud of me, but she thinks I'm a bit mad," she says. "I just kind of realised I needed [the Noumea race] for my soul."

James, now 22, is the true sailor of the family. After studying environmental sciences at Bristol University, and working as a carpenter's hand restoring the historic Antarctic huts used by explorers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott, James has been helping a family friend film a documentary on sharks in Australia. "Now it sounds as though he has a job as a camera assistant with the BBC — that boy has landed on his feet," his sister says. "I haven't had a phone call from him for seven months, but we've both got better at emailing each other. We get on very well, even so."

The siblings are in regular contact with their mother, who still lives in the village of Emsworth, on the south coast of Hampshire — where she first met her husband 31 years ago, and where he is buried. She continues to paint and exhibit her work, and is a trustee of the Sir Peter Blake Trust, encouraging environmental awareness and leadership development. Sarah-Jane, too, has been working with the Trust, drawing a new logo and planning to do more work with youth in time to come.

"I miss funny little Emsworth; I miss Mum," Sarah-Jane says. "But I'm absolutely loving being here. Going for a walk along a west coast beach on a winter's day — you can't do that much in England. I don't know how long I'll be here; I'm finding it hard to think too far ahead at the moment. If I get more work and I can afford to hang out on the beach at the weekend, I'll stay longer.

"I know I'm going to enjoy working here at the museum. I've found a day job that's not mundane, and still gives me time to do my own projects. I want to make more art here; I'd like to immerse myself in some outdoor theatre, street theatre, find a warehouse and put on a performance. I know I'm not going to make any money doing it, but I've got to do it."

Working on Blue Water, Black Magic will have its trying moments for Sarah-Jane — seeing photos and film footage of her father every day is "like looking through a scrapbook — everything seems a little weird." The oddest thing, she says, will be the visual simulation technology that will, in effect, bring back to life the 1995 America's Cup crew on board NZL32, Black Magic. "People walking around a pathway through the exhibition will look at the boat and see 3D renditions of the men working on board. But the idea of seeing my dad in 3D makes me want to not look at it. It will be really bizarre ... I just can't look."

But it was inevitable, it seems, that she would be unable to avoid an inherent desire for adventure. At the very end of Sir Peter's 1996 book, Peter Blake Adventurer, is a message that could have been written for his daughter. "The spirit of adventure never dies. At its best, it is born in the support and sharing of a family or friends. It can manifest itself in the work of the painter, the playing of music or even the laughter of children. It does not have to be competitively top gun, either with others or strangely enough, even oneself. It can be inherited through example, but never imposed. And when the shouting dies away perhaps the greatest reward for an adventurer is to see it quietly growing in the next generation."