ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses in particular on one significant event on the Rangitane's voyage to Auckland: the mid-Pacific staging of the ritual of King Neptune's Court. He draws on literature from the field of emotional geographies to argue that this occasion of maritime 'camp' and pantomime was, for him, a 'de-naturalising' experience unsettling memory and ontological security. The author aims to evolving understandings of blue spaces that extend from a focus on oceans to water-based leisure geographies adding to recent creative approaches to, and representations of, what it is to live with the sea. His most memorable and somewhat traumatic recollection of that voyage was the ritual that occurred aboard the Rangitane at that time. The author provides a glimpse into the ways that his early encounters with the vastness of the ocean and exposure to the unintentionally disturbing ritual of Neptune's Court seeded an aversion to deep water.
