Book Club: Rock and roll sailor vanished at sea; 11 years of unanswered questions

This tale has all the makings of a Netflix documentary. If it doesn’t become one, the streamer should wake up and smell the salt in the ocean air. It has intrigue, a David-and-Goliath battle, a larger-than-life character, and three families who have spent more than a decade trying to find out what happened to their loved ones in the Indian Ocean. How a sailor vanished at sea and is still missing.

The Life and Death of a Rock and Roll Sailor is author and former music journalist Diane Coetzer’s debut book. It’s a true story, written at a pace that could match a Led Zeppelin guitar riff, but behind the rock and roll is a disappearance that has left more questions than answers.

Coetzer originally planned to write a book with her brother-in-law, Anthony John Murray, an experienced delivery skipper whose adventures at sea and on land were the stuff of legend. They even had a title, Rock and Roll Sailor. But in 2015, Murray disappeared with two crew members while delivering a Cape Town-built catamaran to Thailand. Neither the yacht nor the men were ever found.

The disappearance changed everything, including the book’s title. Coetzer added death to what was supposed to have been a celebration of Murray’s extraordinary life. Instead, it became an account of his adventures, the family’s search for answers and what she alleges was corporate indifference to the fate of three men.

Still missing, so are the answers

“The company that he was sailing for was a huge international conglomerate. And they failed us on every single level in trying to search for him. The families had to report the boat missing,” she said. “They didn’t even do that. They owned a goddamn airline. And they didn’t lift a finger.”

Coetzer alleged that the company knew a cyclone had developed in the region and that commercial demands changed after a takeover, despite the dangers of sailing during storm season.

“The company, which was delivering the boats, never sent boats out during the storm season because it’s dangerous,” she said. “But then it gets bought by this big conglomerate, and they’re like, ‘We need these boats. If you want the work, you’re going to do it.'”

Murray was no wealthy adventurer sailing around the world for pleasure. He was a working sailor, highly regarded by his peers and disciplined at sea. On land, however, he loved partying, rock and roll and the freedom to live by his own rules. Alcohol was banned aboard his boats, but ashore it was another matter entirely. “He calls himself like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” Coetzer said. “And the one is on the ocean, and the other is on land.”

Battling corporate indifference

His adventures included playing frisbee with Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards on an island, while his relationship with the ocean was almost spiritual. Coetzer wanted to capture these contradictions and the remarkable stories that came with them.

Before his final voyage, she persuaded Murray to record his recollections on a dictaphone. Those recordings would eventually become invaluable. “I had gold in the fact that I had this small little dictaphone with hours and hours of Anthony talking to it,” she said.

But the book they had planned together became something neither could have imagined. More than 11 years after Murray’s disappearance, the family still does not know exactly what happened aboard the yacht or whether any of the men survived the initial incident.

“We don’t even know fully if he’s dead because we have no body, we have no evidence. We live in this thing of ambiguous loss,” Coetzer said.

There were indications that one or more of the sailors might have reached a life raft, but whether they survived remains unknown. It is the kind of uncertainty that makes grieving almost impossible, because there is no definitive ending.

“Most of the time, as we went further and further along, that hope fragmented. But it never totally goes away.”

Writing the book also meant reopening wounds. Coetzer revisited WhatsApp messages, emails, and recordings from the period surrounding the disappearance, reliving the family’s anguish as she pieced the story together.

“There were times I’d have to stop and cry,” she said. “It really was intensely emotional at times.”

Intensely emotional at times

The recordings have since inspired Requiem for the Impossible, a music and performance project involving Amsterdam-based Effect Lab and musician Lucy Kruger. A Johannesburg planetarium production is also being considered for next year.

But beyond the music, the allegations and the mystery of what happened in the Indian Ocean, Coetzer said the reason for writing the book realised her personal mission.

“The main impulse was to make good on what Anthony and I had always wanted to do, which was to write a book together.”