‘I knew I needed to do something, take some action, to honour his memory… I knew I had to go to Cambodia.’

An extraordinary family’s bluewater cruising life leads them in the wake of a brother captured by the Khmer Rouge. Theresa Nicholson reports

Rob Hamill wasn’t supposed to be in the water that day. Although he was tempted by the gentle cyan waves in the remote Thai anchorage, doctors had treated an infected area on his neck a few days prior and ordered him to stay out of the sea. But his three sons – Finn, Declan and Ivan – were knocking about in Ko Roc’s clear water, free diving to impressive depths, pushing each other to new limits.

Finn was squeezing the last drops of a bluewater cruising adventure – along with some precious family time – out of his too-short visit before returning to Europe to continue his training for the New Zealand Olympic rowing team. The 21-year-old carried the same competitive spirit as his dad and was keen to match his 19-year-old brother Declan’s 30m free dive. Rob, unable to resist, fitted his mask and slipped off the stern of the family’s long-time home, Javelot.

Bluewater cruising near a deep drop in remote Thailand

The 43ft Fountaine Pajot was anchored on the edge of a deep drop-off in the remote southern Thailand marine preserve and the boys used light weights attached to the anchor line to guide them down into the depths. Close in age and interests, they had grown up aboard Javelot.

Rob dove under, watched Finn swim down and spotted Declan kicking off the sea bottom 6m down. When Declan came to the surface, he was gasping for air, briefly dazed from a lack of oxygen. Rob surfaced and took a close look at him as Ivan held him in the water. Suddenly, Rob realized Finn hadn’t surfaced. Jabbing his head under, he saw what no parent ever wants to see: Finn floating lifeless, arms wide like a starfish, 6m down in the deep blue water.

“He’s gone! Finn’s gone!” Rob called out to Declan, Ivan and his wife, Rachel.

Finn had blacked out on his ascent and was drifting toward the deepwater drop-off. Rob dove after him and, together with Declan and Ivan, pushed and dragged him to the surface. Declan clamped Finn’s jaw shut on the ascent to prevent him from taking in more water and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the surface.

As his brothers swum him towards the boat, Finn regained consciousness and spoke, but back on board, his condition worsened and he struggled with shallow, painful breaths and a racing heartbeat. Concerned about secondary drowning, inflammation and pulmonary edema caused by water in the lungs, Rob put out a Pan Pan and a request for oxygen on the VHF while Rachel and Finn went ashore in the dinghy to seek help.

Thai park rangers arranged for a medical boat which took Finn to the mainland and then on to Ko Lanta hospital, where he was assessed and transferred to another major hospital two hours away. He developed pneumonia due to water in his lungs and spent three days in hospital.

Looking back, Rob felt lucky the family had recently watched the free diving movie The Deepest Breath and had initiated recovery techniques for a water blackout but, he says, they should have been more prepared. They all learned much from the terrifying accident. But it is Finn’s reaction that really drove it home to him.

“If Dad hadn’t spotted me, I might have sunk back down, too deep to be recovered,” Finn says. “For dad, he’s lost two brothers. Imagine what it would be like to lose a son.”

Kerry’s last sail

Rob’s brother, Kerry, was another Hamill boy who’d always had an adventurous spirit. He lived aboard and sailed his 23ft sailboat Foxy Lady from Darwin, Australia, to south-east Asia in the mid-1970s.

Communications were limited in those days and Rob remembers his family in New Zealand gathered around the kitchen table reading Kerry’s letters home and living his cruising adventures vicariously. In August of 1978, the young sailor dropped his girlfriend off in Singapore before he, Canadian Stuart Glass and Briton John Dewhirst, set sail.

A storm blew the Foxy Lady off course and into Cambodian waters where the sailors took refuge behind Koh Tang, an island about 50km offshore, not knowing the area was a Khmer Rouge naval base. Armed men approached the boat and opened fire, killing Stuart. Kerry and John Dbyewhirst were captured by the Khmer Rouge, accused of being CIA spies, imprisoned, tortured, forced to make false confessions and murdered. Kerry was 28.

Back at the Hamill family home in New Zealand, the letters stopped. No one knew what had happened to Kerry. Christmas came and went, until in January 1980, after 16 months of painful silence, a distraught neighbour told them to buy a local newspaper. Rob drove to the nearest store with his brother, John, and remembers seeing the headlines: ‘Whakatane yachtsman Kerry Hamill captured and executed by the Khmer Rouge’.

The tragedy tore the close-knit family apart. Rob’s brother John, who had been closest in age to Kerry, killed himself.

For Rob, the seed of sailing the world had already been planted during his teenage years, through the letters Kerry sent home. Following Kerry’s murder, he channelled his energy into becoming an Olympic rower.

His success on the New Zealand team at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics led to competing in – and winning – the first two-man, transatlantic rowing race. He married, started a family, and took a run at New Zealand politics. But the anguish over Kerry’s death and the subsequent impact on his family had never healed.

“There was no place for grief in the 1970s,” Rob says. “No place to put it. It was never discussed, never processed. It was difficult for family members to talk about it openly.

“While I was rowing across the Atlantic, we would take turns at the oars, two hours on, two hours off. When I was off, I would climb into the tiny, suffocating cabin on our (7m craft). All of the physical and mental exhaustion inside me bubbled to the surface and I found myself openly weeping everyday.

“I felt so much isolation and pain and separation from my family.

“I knew I needed to do something, take some action, to honour his memory, and John’s, and deal with the grief. I knew I had to go to Cambodia.”

Article continues below…

Brother Number One

In August of 2009, 30 years after the Cambodian revolution, Rob travelled to Cambodia to testify against Commander Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch. After three decades of impunity, Duch and other senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge were called to stand trial for crimes against humanity. The United Nations-backed trials were part of the war crimes tribunal process, and Rob was invited to give a victim’s statement.

In 1975, under dictator Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia. Pol Pot referred to himself as Brother Number One. The brutal regime was responsible for the deaths of more than two million people, a genocide that killed a quarter of the country’s population.

Comrade Duch controlled the Tuol Sleng prison, or TS-21, in Phnom Penh, where Kerry was held. TS-21 had been a former secondary school; during the revolution, more than 14,000 prisoners were executed there.

Rob’s journey to Cambodia and his testimony at the trial are captured in an intense 2012 documentary, Brother Number One. During his testimony, Rob acknowledged the pain of the Cambodian people and their immense loss. While on the stand, Rob also confronted Duch.

“When you killed my brother Kerry, you also killed my brother John,” Rob said. “The effect of these devastating losses on our family simply cannot be measured. They were massive and incomprehensible.”

In July 2010, Duch was sentenced to 35 years in prison, which was reduced to 19 years for time spent in detention. He died in prison in 2020. “People talk of closure, but grief is an ongoing process,” Rob said. “There is no closure. There is only grief.”

In his wake

Back in New Zealand, as their young sons grew, Rob and Rachel searched for ways to keep their family close. They bought Javelot in 2014 and planned a cruise from New Zealand to Tonga. After 10 months of preparations and a couple of shakedown cruises, when the boys were 13, 11 and 8, they set sail for the South Pacific.

The notoriously difficult crossing from the Bay of Islands to Tonga was rough, but they learned a lot. The return south to New Zealand was another tough passage, but the family decided the liveaboard life was indeed for them.

“We left New Zealand [after that trip] with the loose intent to retrace Kerry’s footsteps in south-east Asia, and a wider dream of circumnavigating,” Rob said. They started The Cruising Kiwi YouTube channel in 2018 and built a loyal following.

The couple hadn’t initially meant to sail to Darwin – where Kerry’s voyage started – but thought they might pick up his trail in Indonesia. When Covid arrived in 2020, they stayed in Australian waters and circumnavigated the country.

From Darwin they retraced Foxy Lady’s journeys through Asia. With Kerry often in their thoughts, they weighed whether to return to Cambodia. “They talk about grief being passed through the generations. I don’t want to have my grief carried subliminally by my family,” Rob said. “I want to talk about it openly, allow my boys to ask questions.”

The Hamills decided to fly to Cambodia from their cruising base in Thailand and visit the TS-21 prison as a family. “I was in tears before I even walked in the door,” Rachel said. “You just go numb. You can’t fathom the horrors people did to other people.”

It made the thing that had cast a shadow over the generations raw and visceral for his sons, Rob said. But he’s glad they went, to walk through the prison and see that this history is real, and try to process it.

Once back in the tuk tuk working their way through the streets of Phnom Penh, emotions overcame Finn. “Thinking back, to when we nearly lost Finn in the free diving accident,” Rob said. “He had the wherewithal to say, ‘If I’d lost my life, like dad lost his brother, my brothers are going to suffer the same sort of grief.’ That is such a beautiful awareness.”

After leaving Thailand, the family set off across the Indian Ocean. For the 1,100-mile sail from the Maldives to the Seychelles, they anticipated a few challenges. The westbound equatorial passage cuts a path through a tough westerly current, and south through the notoriously fickle Intertropical Convergence Zone.

Weather windows along the route can be tight and uncompromising. Although three of the four models on PredictWind showed unsettled systems along the route, after a week of waiting on Addu Atoll, Rob, Rachel, Declan and Ivan, along with ship’s cat Mocha, were ready to go.

“We knew it wouldn’t be the champagne sailing of our previous passage, from Thailand to the Maldives,” said Rachel. It was the kind of window you’d normally avoid, but in a week’s time it could be worse.

Difficult passage

After loading and stowing fuel, water and provisions – including 20 melons and 150 locally-made, still-warm samosas– the boys pulled up the Rocna and pointed a course toward the Seychelles.

The first few days were a blur of sloppy seas, dog watches and equatorial squalls as they inched south in the Indian Ocean, looking for the south-east trades. On the third night around 0300, Rob and Declan were on deck shuffling through sail changes in a constantly changing wind: set the main and genoa, reef, shake out the reefs, motorsail, and repeat.

They’d tightened in the genoa and were hand-steering in muddled seas when the wind shot up to 30-plus knots and caught the genoa at the clew, ripping it to shreds. “It was a complete b*lls-up,” Rob recalls with Kiwi forthrightness.

After another week of rain and sail changes, finally Javelot was in the trades. The last night at sea saw a squall with 35-knot winds pushing them toward their destination, the high, green hills of the Seychelles appearing with the sunrise. “These long ocean passages can be frustrating and demanding,” reflects Rob. “There are so many manoeuvres, so many choices.”

Rob and Rachel hope their life on board has taught the boys how to take risks, big and small. That it’s okay to fail, rebuild, and try again. “We’re building resilience,” Rachel says. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”

Rob, Rachel and Ivan sailed on, exploring Zanzibar, Tanzania and South Africa. Finn splits his time on the boat with his training in New Zealand while Declan is studying and working in Australia. Family and friends join the Hamills on board when they can. “We keep the box of Kerry’s letters on board,” Rachel said. “In a way, we feel we have him with us, too.”

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

Build your knowledge with a subscription delivered to your door. See our latest offers and save at least 30% off the cover price.

The post ‘I knew I needed to do something, take some action, to honour his memory… I knew I had to go to Cambodia.’ appeared first on Yachting World.