In the 60s, I sailed as a radio officer on Panamanian-flagged merchant ships and traveled on the sea for some years. The s/s Bayhorse, mentioned in the novel, is one of the steamships on which I sailed on.
A few years ago, after a large part of my life spent abroad, I decided it was time to stop and retire to the countryside. Now, at my tender age of 76, I was reminded to write. Not because I am an older guy who is bored, on the contrary, living in a big old house, I would find pastimes as bricoleur, as many as I want.
One day, when I put some old books on new shelves, I had a radiotechnics manual in my hands (it was not only an obsolete book but I think incomprehensible to those who nowadays deal with electronics, unless they are also interested in archeology) that had served me, in the night of time, to take the state exam to obtain the license of radio officer. Leafing through it with a little nostalgia, I confess, I started to think that the figure of the radio officer has not only disappeared for many years but, nowadays, few people know what he was doing on board.
At that moment I told myself that it might be nice to tell it around, not only because that role has been part of my life for years, but also because, in those years, no ship in the world would have been allowed to sail without a radio officer on board. I therefore decided to describe and tell circumstances and events that happened on sea, seen through the eyes of the protagonist, a young radio officer.
Halfway through the story, I wondered if I had bored the eventual reader with adventures that, although interesting at first, then become repetitive. Each storm is similar to the others. All evenings spent on shore in an exotic port resemble each other. Human relations on board are always the same, governed by a compulsory hierarchy. So I decided to insert a little mystery into the story, referring to my interest in the history of the universe and in the astrophysics, that have always attracted me as a curious self-taught.
