A tragedy with a hopeless end

A DRAMATIC story told by a devastated wife provided riveting listening for guests at the October Tuesday Rostrum lunch. Karen Tocknell (nee Hagemann), wife of well-known yachtsman, Neil Tocknell, was left with three young children and a future that looked bleak.

Neil was one of the six crew members who were lost at sea during the Mauritius to Durban Ocean Yacht Race in September 2005. At this time Karen was a stay-at- home mother of Jenna-Lee, Sarah and Ryan.

A huge search was started by her and members of the other six families, meeting up at the Durban Yacht Club for any news from the seven countries involved in the search. NASA was also trying to help and even missionaries were contacted in the outlying areas of various regions, where communication was difficult, to ask the local inhabitants to be on the lookout for any objects which could possibly have come from the yacht.

During this time, Karen, who kept a journal/diary said that even now, after nine years, when she goes back and rereads her entries she cannot believe the small details of what she had to cope with just to keep herself going, for her and her young family.

The legalities were absolutely horrendous as all her husband’s assets and bank accounts were frozen. She was fortunate though to have family and friends who are in the legal profession, (at one stage seven lawyers were helping her), to bring her finances together even to having Neil legally declared dead after only one year, (normally the wait is seven years).

During all of this, her father-in-law took ill and sadly died within months of his son going missing. The father and son had been in business together so Karen had to try and take over the running of the company (organic fertilizer) which she tried to do from home as her son Ryan was still so young.

Karen has always lived with faith in her life and believes that this kept her and her family going. She recounted how the night before Neil left, she told him that she didn’t have a good feeling about his trip and asked him how she would cope if she lost him. His answer was that he had complete faith in her and that she would be strong and more than capable of looking after his children. Unfortunately these words turned out to be very prophetic.

One of Karen’s mantras is, ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff and take time to reflect.’ Karen loves her husband deeply and knows that with his absolute confidence in her, she has been able to turn her heartbreak in losing him, into a positive outlook even though she misses him every day. She still speaks to him and asks him for guidance when needed.

She has written a book of her family’s journey in life, ‘My Moquini’ on the hardships they had to face with some degree of normalcy.

It seems that the Fast 42 yacht and its six crew members, Graham Cochrane, Neil Tocknell, Kurt Ostendorf, Sheldon Dickerson, Mark Dickerson and Michael Goolam, disappeared into thin air.

Dickerson was a former Margate lifesaver. He grew up in Margate, attended Port Shepstone Senior Primary and High and was actively involved in the Margate Saints’ Surf Lifesaving Club.

The yacht was found in February 2006, capsized, after being missing for six months, giving its crew little chance of survival.