NCERT Book Class 11 English (Hornbill) Chapter 2 We're Not Afraid to Die... if We Can All Be Together

2. “We’r e N ot Af r aid t o Die. . .
if We Can All Be Toget her ”
G or don Cook and Alan E ast

Notice these expressions in the text.
Infer their meaning from the context.

 honing our seafaring skills  pinpricks in the vast ocean
 ominous silence  a tousled head
 Mayday calls

In July 1976, my wife Mary, son Jonathan, 6, daughter Suzanne, 7, and
I set sail from Plymouth, England, to duplicate the round-the-world
voyage made 200 years earlier by Captain James Cook. For the longest
time, Mary and I — a 37-year-old businessman — had dreamt of sailing
in the wake of the famous explorer, and for the past 16 years we had
spent all our leisure time honing our seafaring skills in British waters.
Our boat Wavewalker, a 23 metre, 30 ton wooden-hulled beauty,
had been professionally built, and we had spent months fitting it out
and testing it in the roughest weather we could find.
The first leg of our planned three-year, 105,000 kilometre journey
passed pleasantly as we sailed down the west coast of Africa to Cape
Town. There, before heading east, we took on two crewmen — American
Larry Vigil and Swiss Herb Seigler — to help us tackle one of the world’s
roughest seas, the southern Indian Ocean.
On our second day out of Cape Town, we began to encounter strong
gales. For the next few weeks, they blew continuously. Gales did not
worry me; but the size of the waves was alarming —up to 15 metres,
as high as our main mast.