Senses

"Through this difficult period Gibbs had a helpful distraction. In October 2003, just after the Aquada’s public launch, he’d bought a boat in partnership with Douglas Myers. No ordinary boat, *Senses* was a 59 metre, 1000 ton ship, equipped with two helipads, one helicopter and a flotilla of small craft, including a charming 12.8 metre Nelson tender and a Halmatic Atlantic 24, a high-speed rigid inflatable favoured by the British military. *Senses* had a crew of 14. *Senses* was designed to be equally at home in the Arctic or Saint-Tropez, and best of all, for Gibbs, it had a ramp at the stern up which he could drive an Aquada. With the helicopter, Aquada and other boats, *Senses* was really a luxury base for exploration. When cruising up the coast from Barcelona to Nice it was possible to fly into Perpignan for a bistro lunch, or drive the Aquada in."

"While the Gibbs clan summered in New Zealand from January to March 2005, *Senses* sailed to the Caribbean in preparation for a season of exploration in Central America. Gibbs joined the boat in Belize in April 2005. As it cruised south towards Panama, Gibbs flew with his daughter and new son-in-law to towns throughout Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. In Panama, they visited their friend Johnny Pigozzi, the son of the founder of the French car maker Simca. He’d developed the Liquid Jungle Lab, an ecological research outpost there. Gibbs and Pigozzi wandered about discussing butterflies and the infinite variety of nature in a steaming jungle."

"While Gibbs was back in London wrestling with the next stage of the amphibian project, *Senses* was taken hundreds of miles up the Amazon River to Manaus, a city of more than a million people in the middle of the jungle. Since they were thought to be amongst the first foreign private cruisers up the river since the murder of the New Zealand yachtsman Sir Peter Blake outside the violent river town of Macapa at the end of 2001, they’d taken the precaution of having an armed Ghurkha on board. Gibbs arrived in August 2005, and they prepared to travel up the Negro and Solimoes arms of the great river system upstream from Manaus. The Negro runs black but clear, like tea, while the Solimoes flows brown and muddy. When the two rivers meet at Manaus the currents and eddies produce elegant black and brown swirls that from the helicopter looked like works of art."

"So, in the sweltering heat of Macapa in September 2005, he proposed to Myers that they go their separate ways; Myers keep the boat and Gibbs take the helicopter. Myers was annoyed at the sudden change of plans, but on reflection was not surprised. ‘Alan,’ he says, ‘doesn’t like to be pegged down. His idea of fun is to turn up at an airport, see where the next plane is going to and jump aboard. With Senses, by contrast, you can’t just go where you want; you’ve got a crew, a big organisation, another owner — it is the antithesis of freedom.’[27](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477408-606132179-27)"