Review: Shipwrecked and adrift for 118 days, a couple's love holds fast in ‘A Marriage at Sea'

San Francisco Chronicle​

08-07-2025

​​On June 28, 1972, 40-year-old Maurice and 32-year-old Maralyn Bailey set sail aboard a 30-foot sailboat they named Auralyn on what they hoped would be a yearslong voyage from England to New Zealand.
Their plan was to travel across the Bay of Biscay to Spain, then to Madeira and the Canary Islands, then 2,700 miles across the Atlantic Ocean through the Caribbean, Panama Canal, across the Pacific Ocean to the Galapagos. After that, they'd sail to the Marquesas Islands, the Tuamotu Islands and Fiji, before arriving at their final destination.
But on March 4, 1973, eight months into their expedition, the unthinkable happened: a 40-foot-long sperm whale slammed into their boat, creating a gash in its side. Within minutes — just enough time for the Baileys to grab their passports, a log book, a compass, Maralyn's diary and a few other essentials, before jumping into their 4.5-foot-in-diameter life boat and attached dinghy — Auralyn gracefully sank into the depths, about 300 miles from the Galapagos.
For the next four months, the Baileys were stranded on the high seas with only the stars, a compass, a sextant and a tattered copy of 'Nautical Almanac' to guide them. (Of note: They decided not to take along a radio transmitter 'to preserve their freedom from outside interference' — and Maralyn didn't know how to swim.)
The couple's harrowing ordeal is recounted in award-winning journalist Sophie Elmhirst's gripping first book, 'A Marriage at Sea.' In shocking, stomach-lurching detail, Elmhirst brings readers along on their journey, from the moment Maralyn first came up with the idea to sell their house and build a boat so they could become 'real travelers, real explorers, free,' to the arduous months the Baileys were stranded in the ocean, to their eventual rescue by a Korean fishing boat, to the media circus that erupted on land once the Baileys' story got out.
To say Elmhirst's book is nail-bitingly tense at times is an understatement.
There's the unease that comes with wondering whether one or both of the Baileys will be forced to endure some sort of horrific torture while floating aimlessly in the ocean — disease, sea creature attack, falling overboard during a violent storm, dehydration and madness are just a few things that come to mind.
We're also given a front-row seat to all the clever (read: disturbing) ways the couple tries to circumvent their doomed fate — think scavenging for food by bashing sea turtles' heads in and wringing sharks' necks.
But aside from all the adrenaline boosting and gory reports of oozing butt sores, rancid meat and lack of potable water, part of what makes 'A Marriage at Sea' so compulsively readable is Elmhirst's meditation on the Bailey's relationship as their marriage is put to the ultimate test.
Though these sections could use a little more showing rather than telling, the passages in which she describes Maralyn's habit of boosting Maurice's morale in moments of despair — by creating playing cards to keep him busy or repeatedly prompting him to imagine a future expedition to Patagonia, for example — demonstrate not only the quiet beauty of mature love but also its inherent elasticity and ability to withstand damage.
After the emaciated, somewhat delusional Baileys are miraculously rescued, Elmhirst's nuanced portrayal of their bewildered return to society scores high marks, too. Yes, there's the relief and fame. But she also eloquently captures the vertigo that can happen when a life-altering, singular experience is pitted against mundane reality.
As in this passage: 'But as he tried to explain what had happened, Maurice realized that nothing he said came close to the truth. He could describe how they made the fishhooks, or cut up the turtles, but that didn't bear any relation to how filleting the fish or eating turtle fat felt. How could anyone who hadn't known what they'd known possibly understand?'
'A Marriage at Sea' is one attempt to do so — and a valiant one at that. It's a propulsive, perceptive portrait of two lovers literally adrift at sea — and the ties that keep bringing them back together, against all odds.
Alexis Burling is a freelance writer.