In the tradition of Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, an intensely gripping account of the round-the-world single-handed yacht race that claimed the life of Canadian sailor Gerry Roufs in a make-or-break dash through 12,000 miles of terror in the Southern Ocean.
Godforsaken Sea is the hair-raising account of the world's most demanding, dangerous, and deadly sailing race. Around the world, one sailor, one boat, no stops, no assistance. Author Derek Lundy's vivid book follows the field of the 1996 - 1997 Vendee Globe through the race's grueling four-month circumnavigation of the globe, most of it through the terror of the Southern Ocean. Lundy narrates the race through the eyes and experiences of sixteen sailors - fourteen men and two women - who embdoy the best and most eccentric aspects of our human condition. There's the gallant Brit who spends days beating back against the worst seas to save a fellow sailor; the Frenchman who bothers to salvage only a bottle of champagne from his broken and sinking boat; the sailor who comes to love the albatross that trails her for months, naming it Bernard; the sailor who calmly smokes a cigarette as his boat capsizes; and the Canadian who, hours before he disappears forever, dispatches this message: If you drag things out too long here, you're sure to come to grief. With the literary touch of Saint-Exupery and Conrad, Derek Lundy harnesses hurricane-force winds, six story waves, icebergs, and deafening noise. And he lays bare the spirit of the men and women who push themselves to the outer limits of human endeavor - even if it means never returning home.
From the author of Godforsaken Sea -- a #1 bestseller in Canada and “one of the best books ever written about sailing” (Time magazine) -- comes a magnificent re-creation of a square-rigger voyage round Cape Horn at the end of the 19th century. In The Way of a Ship, Derek Lundy places his seafaring great-great uncle, Benjamin Lundy, on board the Beara Head and brings to life the ship’s community as it performs the exhausting and dangerous work of sailing a square-rigger across the sea. The “beautiful, widow-making, deep-sea” sailing ships could sail fast in almost all weather and carry substantial cargo. Handling square-riggers demanded detailed and specialized skills, and life at sea, although romanticized by sea-voyage chroniclers, was often brutal. Seamen were sleep deprived and malnourished, at times half-starved, and scurvy was still a possibility. Derek Lundy reminds readers what Melville and Conrad expressed so well: that the sea voyage is an overarching metaphor for life itself. As Benjamin Lundy nears the Horn and its attendant terrors, the traditional qualities of the sailor -- fatalism, stoicism, courage, obedience to a strict hierarchy, even sentimentality -- are revealed in their dying days, as sail gave way to steam. Derek Lundy tells his gripping tale with the kind of storytelling skill and writerly breadth that is usually the ken of our finest novelists, and in so doing, imagines a harrowing and wholly credible history for his seafaring Irish-Canadian ancestor.
An adventure story set against the backdrop of a son trying to understand his father After a 25-year break from boating, Brian Harvey circumnavigates Vancouver Island with his wife, his dog, and a box of documents that surfaced after his father’s death. John Harvey was a neurosurgeon, violinist, and photographer who answered his door a decade into retirement to find a sheriff with a summons. It was a malpractice suit, and it did not go well. Dr. Harvey never got over it. The box contained every nurse’s record, doctor’s report, trial transcript, and expert testimony related to the case. Only Brian’s father had read it all — until now. In this beautifully written memoir, Brian Harvey shares how after two months of voyaging with his father’s ghost, he finally finds out what happened in the O.R. that crucial night and why Dr. Harvey felt compelled to fight the excruciating accusations.
Michael Scott Moore, a journalist and the author of Sweetness and Blood, incorporates personal narrative and rigorous investigative journalism in this profound and revelatory memoir of his three-year captivity by Somali pirates—a riveting,thoughtful, and emotionally resonant exploration of foreign policy, religious extremism, and the costs of survival. In January 2012, having covered a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online International—and funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting—Michael Scott Moore traveled to the Horn of Africa to write about piracy and ways to end it. In a terrible twist of fate, Moore himself was kidnapped and subsequently held captive by Somali pirates. Subjected to conditions that break even the strongest spirits—physical injury, starvation, isolation, terror—Moore’s survival is a testament to his indomitable strength of mind. In September 2014, after 977 days, he walked free when his ransom was put together by the help of several US and German institutions, friends, colleagues, and his strong-willed mother. Yet Moore’s own struggle is only part of the story: The Desert and the Sea falls at the intersection of reportage, memoir, and history. Caught between Muslim pirates, the looming threat of Al-Shabaab, and the rise of ISIS, Moore observes the worlds that surrounded him—the economics and history of piracy; the effects of post-colonialism; the politics of hostage negotiation and ransom; while also conjuring the various faces of Islam—and places his ordeal in the context of the larger political and historical issues. A sort of Catch-22 meets Black Hawk Down, The Desert and the Sea is written with dark humor, candor, and a journalist’s clinical distance and eye for detail. Moore offers an intimate and otherwise inaccessible view of life as we cannot fathom it, brilliantly weaving his own experience as a hostage with the social, economic, religious, and political factors creating it. The Desert and the Sea is wildly compelling and a book that will take its place next to titles like Den of Lions and Even Silence Has an End.
Large Print Edition of the true account of the 2017-2018 solo non-stop circumnavigation by Jerome Rand aboard the Westsail 32 "Mighty Sparrow". A testament to endurance and adventure, this memoir recounts what life is like aboard a small sailboat during a 271 day voyage around the globe, alone and without stopping. One of the greatest challenges of both body and mind, the author will take you onboard during the good times and the bad. As one of only a handful of people to have ever succeed in such a small boat, this story is truly the adventure of a lifetime.
“The tale of Carl Wake and the hurricane that was waiting for him goes straight to the heart of the greatest sea stories: they are not about man against the sea, but man against himself. John Kretschmer’s book is as perfectly shaped and flawlessly written as such a story can be. In addition to being the best depiction I have ever read of what it is like to be inside a hurricane at sea, At the Mercy of the Sea is as moving a story of a man’s failure and redemption as can be found anywhere in the literature of the sea. This book is surely destined to become a classic.”—Peter Nichols, author of Sea Change and A Voyage for Madmen “John Kretschmer has transformed this story of three men on a collision course with a hurricane into a modern seafaring classic.”—Peter Nielsen, editor of SAIL magazine “With expert analysis and taut writing, he draws readers into that mad storm. You can’t turn away. You keep reading until it breaks your heart.”—Fred Grimm, columnist for the Miami Herald “Once begun, his vivid and powerful narrative is impossible to put down.”—Derek Lundy, author of Godforsaken Sea and The Way of a Ship “I felt I knew Carl Wake, because John Kretschmer found in him an archetype—an aging sailor with an age-old dream.”—Jim Carrier, transatlantic sailor and author of The Ship and the Storm: Hurricane Mitch and the Loss of the Fantome “A remarkable book, impossible to put down.”—Herb McCormick, sailing journalist
This is the story of the Endeavour, from its commissioning as a vessel to enable the study of the transit of Venus, through its momentous and far-reaching voyage of discovery, to its return to England in 1771. It is also the story of the people on board and the life led during the voyage.
Rollrock is an isolated, windswept island; a wild and salty landscape where fishermen and their families must wring a living from the stormy seas. But Rollrock is also a place of eerie magic, and of powerful desire. Down on the beach, the outcast witch of Rollrock casts her spells, and draws mysterious girls from the sea. These are girls with long, pale limbs and faces of haunting innocence - the most enchantingly beautiful creatures the fishermen of Rollrock have ever seen. The island is envied, and many a man is lured to Rollrock with the promise of a sea wife. But the arrival of these women is the ruin of countless families - and to the despair of the men of Rollrock, magic always has its price. The brides do not belong on land. One day, the sea will claim them back.
"His real name was Arthur Jones. He was born in Liverpool in 1929, the illegitimate son of a working-class Lancashire girl, and he grew up in orphanages with little education. Too young to see action in the World War II naval battles he would later write about so movingly, he joined the Royal Navy in 1946 and served fourteen unremarkable years." "Arthur Jones then bought an old sailboat and tried his hand at smuggling whiskey cross-Channel. In his early thirties he sailed into a Mediterranean limbo, scraping a living from charters by day and haunting the bars of Ibiza by night. When he was drunk, which was often, he could be loud and obnoxious and had the scars to prove it. He had no family, no attachments, no accomplishments." "Then came a midlife sea change. Arthur Jones looked into his future, imagined greatness, and began to claw his way to it. Having taught himself to sail, he taught himself to write. He was a natural at both. As Tristan Jones, in his midforties, he sailed out of Brazil's Mato Grosso and into a Greenwich Village apartment to write six books in three years and reinvent his past." "The Tristan Jones of his books was born in a storm at sea in 1924 on his father's tramp steamer; was torpedoed three times in epic World War II engagements; completed the first circumnavigation of Iceland; traveled farther north and farther up the Amazon River than any sailor before him; and sailed more than 400,000 miles, 180,000 of them solo. Readers loved his books and crowded his lectures and signings. He had a bard's voice and a street performer's delivery. He had more reknown than he could have dreamed." "Having invented a life, Tristan Jones tried to live it. After the amputation of his left leg in 1982 he sailed more than halfway around the world. He lost his right leg in 1991 yet still returned briefly to sea. But as his body failed him, so too did his spirits. It was as if the life from which he'd bodily lifted himself were pulling him down again. He died a bitter man."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved