Small Boat to Freedom

"Small Boat to Freedom" is the moving and inspiring story of one man's decision to leave the country he loved because of a political situation he abhorred. John Vigor had it all: a loving family, a secure and well-deserved reputation as a syndicated South African newspaper columnist, and a lovely home in one of South Africa's most beautiful cities, Durban. But an apartheid-regime clampdown on freedom of expression forced Vigor to make the wrenching decision to abandon his idyllic life - and financial security - and leave South Africa on a thirty-one-foot sloop with his wife and seventeen-year-old son, for a precarious voyage to a new but uncertain life in America. At age fifty, Vigor had been a popular newspaper columnist for eighteen years, and a journalist for thirty years, working for anti-apartheid newspapers, raising a family of three sons with his wife, June, also a journalist. But in 1987 the South African government and its once untouchable apartheid policy was crumbling. In an attempt to clamp down on dissident opinion, the government began restricting writers.
The Vigors knew it was time to leave, but to do so meant losing most of their savings, the scant remainder of which they used to purchase a boat for the dangerous voyage from Durban, past the treacherous Cape of Storms, around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the South Atlantic to Florida.