The wind powers everything a sailor does and this book will help you to understand it. As a result you will be more prepared for your race, able to anticipate changes in the wind better and know what to do when they come. The first edition of this book was published in 1986, and it has been the go-to wind book for dinghy champions ever since. This new-look fourth edition is fully updated for modern forecasting and analyses a revised set of popular racing venues around the world: unveiling what to expect from the weather at over 25 regatta locations, it will get you ahead of the competition and powering up the leaderboard.
As the San Francisco waterfront struggled in the grip of the Great Depression, fifteen-year-old Russ Hofvendahl talked his way aboard an old fashioned four-masted schooner and sailed out beyond the Golden Gate Bridge to catch cod in the Bering Sea. Full of laconic candor, Hard on the Wind recounts this formative journey with vivid anecdotes depicting a world that exists today only in memory. Featuring many period photos of the ship and crew, Hofvendahl's compelling narrative of seafaring adventure relates the difficult lessons he learned while crashing through raging seas, dodging bloody fights in the fo'c's'le, handlining for cod, navigating through blind fog, and mourning a lost shipmate. Aglow with warmth and humor, Hofvendahl's memoir captures both the romance and reality of the seafaring life, and constitutes a truly unique coming-of-age tale.
In this exquisitely rendered memoir set on the high plains of Texas, Pulitzer Prize winner Gail Caldwell transforms into art what it is like to come of age in a particular time and place. A Strong West Wind begins in the 1950s in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle–a place of both boredom and beauty, its flat horizons broken only by oil derricks, grain elevators, and church steeples. Its story belongs to a girl who grew up surrounded by dust storms and cattle ranches and summer lightning, who took refuge from the vastness of the land and the ever-present wind by retreating into books. What she found there, from renegade women to men who lit out for the territory, turned out to offer a blueprint for her own future. Caldwell would grow up to become a writer, but first she would have to fall in love with a man who was every mother’s nightmare, live through the anguish and fire of the Vietnam years, and defy the father she adored, who had served as a master sergeant in the Second World War. A Strong West Wind is a memoir of culture and history–of fathers and daughters, of two world wars and the passionate rebellions of the sixties. But it is also about the mythology of place and the evolution of a sensibility: about how literature can shape and even anticipate a life. Caldwell possesses the extraordinary ability to illuminate the desires, stories, and lives of ordinary people. Written with humanity, urgency, and beautiful restraint, A Strong West Wind is a magical and unforgettable book, destined to become an American classic.
"Sailing Against the Wind" was written in 1980, though never published. It is an accounting of the three years the Larson family lived and traveled on a ketch rigged sailboat. The book is intended, not as an instruction manual on how to sail, but entirely as a diary of daily life and the difficulties found in close quarters while at sea. All five family members kept journals and when Toni sat down to write this, the journals gave a clear and accurate guide for her to work with. Over all the years since this manuscript was written, people have quizzed them, "What was it like? How did you do it? Was it hard? Were you scared?" The manuscript answers all those questions and has been shared with friends and family who were curious. The book does not cover the finer details of charting, trimming sails, repairing the engine, etc. Instead, it reveals how to live, survive, love and learn as a family while sailing against the wind. Now, in this era of downsizing into boats, rv's and tiny houses this diary of events may have relevance. The mid-1970s were the last years before the introduction of personal computers, the Internet, email, GPS, ATM, cell phones, and all forms of advanced electronics. Those things were not even available on the most luxurious boats at the time this adventure occurred. Navigation tools in the '70s were almost identical to that of explorers some 250 years before. However, if all those wonderful inventions had been available, it still would not have saved them from the many mishaps they encountered. And that is the lesson of this book.
The New York Times bestseller “The Shadow of the Wind is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero.” —Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice) “One gorgeous read.” —Stephen King Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.
By Terry Nathans he weather and climate of the trans-Mississippi west was virtually unknown at the begin- Tning of the nineteenth century. This changed dramatically shortly after the Louisiana P- chase was signed in 1803, which set the stage for acquiring the first systematic weather measurements of the trans-Mississippi west. The framework for obtaining these measurements was outlined in the now famous June 20, 1803 letter from President Thomas Jefferson to his protégé and personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis. In that letter, Jefferson instructed Lewis to plan and carry out an overland expedition to the Pacific Ocean for the purposes of commerce, and to observe and record a broad range of natural history subjects, including the ...climate, as characterised by the thermometer, by the proportion of rainy, cloudy & clear days, by lightning, hail, snow, ice, by the access & recess of frost, by the winds prevailing at different s- sons, the dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flower, or leaf... (Jackson 1978, p. 63). Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis, which were part of his decades-long ambition of laun- ing an expedition to explore the interior of North America, were made at the threshold of what Fleming (1990) has called the “expanding horizons” in meteorology. During this period, more reliable meteorological instruments began to emerge allowing for a more comprehensive and systematic acquisition of weather data.
Following The Highest Tide, Border Songs, and Truth Like the Sun, Jim Lynch now gives us a grand and idiosyncratic family saga that will stand alongside Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Joshua Johannssen has spent all of his life surrounded by sailboats. His grandfather designed them, his father built and raced them, his Einstein-obsessed mother knows why and how they work (or not). For Josh and his two siblings, their backyard was the Puget Sound and sailing their DNA. But both his sister and brother fled many years ago: Ruby to Africa and elsewhere to do good works on land, and Bernard to god-knows-where at sea, a fugitive and pirate. Suddenly thirty-one, Josh—who repairs boats of all kinds in a Steinbeckian marina south of Seattle—is pained and confused by whatever the hell went wrong with his volatile family. His parents are barely speaking, his mystified grandfather is drinking harder, and he himself—despite an endless and comic flurry of online dates—hasn’t even come close to finding a girlfriend. But when the Johannssens unexpectedly reunite for the most important race in these waters—all of them together on a classic vessel they made decades ago—they will be carried to destinies both individual and collective, and to a heart-shattering revelation. Past and present merge seamlessly and collide surprisingly as Jim Lynch reveals a family unlike any other, with the grace and humor and magic of a master storyteller.
The origins of a remarkable number of everyday words and phrases are anchored in our seafaring past. Three Sheets to the Wind: The Nautical Origins of Everyday Expressions is an entertaining compilation revealing the maritime roots of common English expressions. The original “slush fund” was the fatty scraps from boiled meat that the ship’s cook secretly stashed away to sell at port to candle makers. The man who originally “turned a blind eye” was Admiral Nelson. In one of Naval history’s most famous acts of insubordination, Nelson, in the heat of battle, raised his telescope to his blind eye and announced he could not see the signal flag commanding him to break off action. The perfect companion for etymology lovers, factophiles, ocean dreamers, and the conversationally curious, Three Sheets to the Wind features 200 words and expressions that are nautically inspired. Alphabetically organized (from A to Sea) readers can also enjoy 100 original illustrations as well as relevant excerpts from the great novels of Melville, Forester, O’Brian, and others. These passages illustrate how such literary giants reached for these expressions in their classic masterpieces. Our everyday speech is peppered with language used by sailors when someone says they are “pooped” because they stayed to the “bitter end” of “happy hour”.
Now a Netflix film starring and directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, this is a gripping memoir of survival and perseverance about the heroic young inventor who brought electricity to his Malawian village. When a terrible drought struck William Kamkwamba's tiny village in Malawi, his family lost all of the season's crops, leaving them with nothing to eat and nothing to sell. William began to explore science books in his village library, looking for a solution. There, he came up with the idea that would change his family's life forever: he could build a windmill. Made out of scrap metal and old bicycle parts, William's windmill brought electricity to his home and helped his family pump the water they needed to farm the land. Retold for a younger audience, this exciting memoir shows how, even in a desperate situation, one boy's brilliant idea can light up the world. Complete with photographs, illustrations, and an epilogue that will bring readers up to date on William's story, this is the perfect edition to read and share with the whole family.
