Sailing Memoir

It’s the sixties. Everything’s groovy. Teenagers bask in the freedom of a country transformed. Counterculture is on the rise, and the times, they-are-a-changing. Everything, that is, except the author’s young life. She doesn’t swoon for the Beatles or scream for the Stones. She doesn’t protest the Vietnam War or fight for women’s rights. Instead, from age seven to sixteen, she accompanies her father to a dilapidated barn on the edge of a dusty little town located on the outskirts of San Francisco, where she works after school building a ship that is supposed to set her free.

Home from Distant Seas completes the trilogy of books by James Baldwin recounting his 25 years of live-aboard cruising adventures. The author creates a tribute to the sea and to those who venture upon her in small voyaging sailboats as he describes his personal journey of survival and discovery at sea as well as the sailors and local people he met along the way. Continuing here with the memoir of his second adventurous circumnavigation begun in his earlier books Bound for Distant Seas and The Next Distant Sea.

Humphrey Bogart spent some 40 weekends a year sailing his Olin Stephens designed yacht Santana, and earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the most accomplished racers and skippers in Southern California. Be it a long race around the islands or at anchor off some pebbled beach, Bogie felt at ease amongst sailors, whose respect he had earned both on and off the waters.

A true story of poor judgment and questionable parenting, but also of friendship and adventure. A cubicle-dwelling nine-to-fiver hatches a secret plan to buy an old Dutch sailboat, fix her up, and return to the Pacific via the Northwest Passage. His wife hopes for a family. Somehow, both dreams are set in motion–simultaneously. Undeterred, they pack a single suitcase, their six pound newborn, and board a flight to the Netherlands. The boat is a slowly-sinking national treasure, her engine a museum piece. If all goes according to plan, they’ll be ready to cross the Atlantic by autumn.

Jurgen Grobler’s Olympic coaching career is one of legend, yet the man himself has remained resolutely out of the spotlight. Over the last 20 years he has masterminded British Rowing’s incomparable success. And when the difference between gold and silver can mean mere fractions of a second, Jurgen Grobler has consistently delivered Olympic gold through various boat classes and with an ever-changing group of athletes.

In 1971, Elizabeth Garber’s domineering father announced he was sending his “problem children”—seventeen-year-old bookish Elizabeth and her fourteen-year-old brother Woodie—to a school on a sailing ship, in order to “shape up and learn to work.” Sailing at the Edge of Disaster chronicles Garber’s adventures, along with the fifty teen misfits and their teacher chaperones aboard the sailing school housed on a once-magnificent yacht formerly owned by General Post heiress, socialite, and philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post.

Ben and Helen Harrison set aside their comfortable life in San Francisco and headed to Costa Rica to build a 38-foot sailboat. They had never built a boat before...Then they had to get it down a mountainside to the water, and from there sail to Key West, where they now live. It was a dauntless task and a challenge that put their marriage, their sanity, and their very lives on the line. A real-life adventure that will make you feel like you’ve got a berth on La Dulce Mujer Pintada, the Sweet Painted Lady.

Imagine spending 24 hours a day with your spouse in 31 not-so-square feet for years, crossing the Pacific Ocean on two gallons of fuel, and tossing spaghetti marinara around your living room then cleaning it up while bouncing like ice in a martini shaker. Tightwads on the Loose tells the story of Wendy and Garth, lured to sea by the promise of adventure. They buy a 31-foot boat that fits their budget better than it fits Garth's large frame and set sail on an open-ended voyage, never imagining they'd be gone seven years or cover 34,000 miles at the pace of a fast walk.

Boat Girl is the heartbreaking memoir of growing up aboard a sailboat. Throughout the 1980's and 90's, Melanie's family lived aboard a 47-foot sailboat, spending their summers along the US East Coast and their winters in the Bahamas. But the cruising life was not all fun in the sun. The family had to work hard to pay for their way of life. They dodged hurricanes, overzealous federal agents and bullying land-kids. And they endured a boatload of family drama.

Christian Beamish, a former editor at The Surfer's Journal, envisioned a low-tech, self-reliant exploration for surf along the coast of North America, using primarily clothes and instruments available to his ancestors, and the 18-foot boat he would build by hand in his garage. How the vision met reality - and how the two came to shape each other - places The Voyage of the Cormorant in the great American tradition of tales of life at sea, and what it has to teach us.

As founder and editor of the highly successful magazine Latitudes & Attitudes, he surveys and comments on the good and the bad, the funny and the sad, the practical and the theoretical of the sailing scene. This collection of his editorials and other writings is full of useful advice, keen observations and, yes, some outrageous comments, the way only Bob can put them on paper.

The Sydney to Hobart yacht race is one of the world's major sporting events. In 1998, it became one of the world's major sporting disasters. Six sailors tragically perished, and numerous yachts sank or were badly damaged. the subsequent search and rescue operation was one of the most phenomenally accomplished peacetime efforts the world has ever seen. In this fully updated edition to mark the 10th anniversary of the tumultuous race, Rob Mundle, one of Australia's leading journalists and yachtsmen, tells this story of challenge and survival with compassion, vigour and understanding.

Here is the inspiring story of a man who overcame childhood polio to live an adventure-filled life as captain of Maine's most famous windjammer, the schooner Adventure, now a national historic landmark in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Captain Jim shares his adventures afloat, his battles with bureaucracy, and even how he created one of Maine's most unusual restaurants.

Danie Couchman grew up on the move, her family never staying still long enough for her to say where she's from. At 25, and living in her 17th home, she finds herself drowning in the rush of London life and makes an impulsive decision: to buy a narrowboat and make it her home. Surrounded by an eclectic and itinerant community in the uncharted territory of the capital's urban wilderness, Danie becomes fully immersed in this hidden world. Each day on board her boat, Genesis, is an adventure full of disaster and magic.

In 1968 Donald Crowhurst was trying to market a nautical navigation device he had developed and saw the Sunday Times Golden Globe 'round the world sailing race as the perfect opportunity to showcase his product. Few people knew that he wasn't an experienced deep-water sailor. His progress was so slow that he decided to shortcut the journey, falsifying his location through radio messages from his supposed course. Everyone following the race thought that he was winning, and a hero's welcome awaited him at home in Britain.

The world is never done catching up with Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the author of Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and other classics. A prophet of environmentalism and vegetarianism, an abolitionist, and a critic of materialism and technology, Thoreau even seems to have anticipated a world of social distancing in his famous experiment at Walden Pond. In Now Comes Good Sailing, 27 of today’s leading writers offer wide-ranging original pieces exploring how Thoreau has influenced and inspired them.

Leaving her garden to the mercy of the slugs, award-winning writer Alys Fowler set out in an inflatable kayak to explore Birmingham's canal network, full of little-used waterways where huge pike skulk and kingfishers dart. Her book is about noticing the wild everywhere and what it means to see beauty where you least expect it. What happens when someone who has learned to observe her external world in such detail decides to examine her internal world with the same care?

Named one of Time Magazine International's 30 most important people of 2005, Maud Fontenoy presents us with a terrific, entertaining adventure story on the high seas as she challenges the Pacific Ocean - a feat no woman before her ever accomplished. Already the first woman to row alone across the North Atlantic, Maud raised the bar to defy the elements, the daunting solitude, and the circling sharks of the South Pacific on her second solo voyage.

Written and read by Jessica Watson, this is the story of a remarkable girl who followed her dream and conquered the world. There is something different about adventurers, about the way their minds work. They look at the world as a place of challenges and though they know what fear is, they refuse to be hindered by it.

In Unsinkable, you will follow Abby into the depths through a gripping and evocative firsthand account that starts prior to her departure, travels through her daring (and sometimes near-death) encounters on the open sea, to her dramatic rescue in the remotest part of the Indian Ocean. Today, when the most productive thing a teenager may do is play videogames, Abby's courage and tenacity shows us all what can happen when we choose to challenge our own limits, embrace faith, and aim for what our critics say is impossible.