A few years ago, after a large part of my life spent abroad, I decided it was time to moor myself on shore 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 wireless officer. Leafing through it with a little nostalgia, I confess, I started to think that the figure of the wireless 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 wireless 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 wireless 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.

Author interview

Oriano Galvanini was born in Trieste in 1944 and now lives in Pozzuolo del Friuli. He has sailed in the 60' as wireless officer on merchant steamships flying Panamenian flag. One of them is the s/s Bayhorse described in the novel.