All Booked Up For Winter

Boat/US Magazine, Nov, 2000

Whether the first frost has settled on your boat cover or your boating season is just getting under way in the southern states, a welcome flock of new books has landed ready to take the landlocked back to sea and beyond.

Nautical tales, both fiction and non, can be a welcome portal by which to travel vicariously. And rather than buying another set of matching place mats or plastic mugs for Christmas, there are books like The Hungry Ocean, Ghost Ships or Fatal Storm that make great gifts.

The editors of BOAT/U.S. Magazine get numerous review copies of books about boating. Here are a few we particularly enjoyed:

Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat by Peter Nichols

Five years of cruising and living aboard a 27-foot wooden sailboat with no engine can take its toll on a relationship. For Peter Nichols, who wrote this wonderful memoir about the breakup of his marriage and of his boat, Toad, the beginning of the end starts in England. His wife, identified only as "J," has fled to Greece, leaving him to single-hand Toad back across the Atlantic to Maine. About a week into his trip, he discovers J's diaries in an old sailbag. For the first time, he reads them, a painful but eventually illuminating process that continues through the rest of his trip.

Nichols tells of his marital and sailing downturn in the form of a ship's log, and it works very well. As he learns to accept the dissolution of his marriage, he tries -- too successfully -- to overlook the dissolution of Toad as she takes on water. Finally, with knee-deep water in the cabin 200 miles from Bermuda, he issues a mayday call.

Although Nichols is alone, he has plenty of company. Toad's library is full of books about other cruises, and Nichols quotes from them extensively to create a book about sailing, boat restoration, navigating, troubleshooting and, ultimately, abandoning ship.

This is a book that stays with you long after you've finished it. It belongs on every cruising boater's bookshelf.

Ghost Ships by Richard Winer

Subtitled "True Stories of Nautical Nightmares, Hauntings and Disasters," this paperback from the best-selling author of The Devil's Triangle sails a well-charted course though the annals of the sea. Like predecessors of the genre such as They Sailed into Oblivion (Hoeling), Posted Missing (Villiers) and Mysteries of the Sea (de la Croix), Ghost Ships recounts unexplained maritime disasters and strange incidents at sea. They're all here: vessels that vanish in fine weather without a trace or an SOS, ships that turn up far off course with no crew aboard and still others that were said to be jinxed at their launchings or went on to be haunted by long-dead crew.

Old favorites are here like the USS Cyclops, a Navy collier that vanished in the Atlantic in 1918 with no logical explanation (no, it wasn't a German U-boat) and Joyita, a former yacht that wined and dined Hollywood film stars of the 1930s. Said to have been cursed by the widow of a shipwright killed during construction, the vessel lost several passengers under mysterious circumstances in the 1940s and turned up floating in the Pacific in 1955 with no crew, a thousand miles from where she should have been.

This book is a concise package of nearly three dozen seagoing mysteries of the 20th century but Winer adds research about some classic cases -- Cyclops apparently is his life's work -- and new speculations about the fates of others. Good reading for long winter nights ashore.

The Hungry Ocean; A Swordboat Captain's Journey

The unvarnished truth about life on board a swordfish boat as told in the first person by Linda Greenlaw, one of the most successful commercial fishermen on the East Coast. She was featured in The Perfect Storm as Capt. Billy Tyne's friend and sometime nemesis who captained the Andrea Gail's sister ship, Hannah Boden.

Linda Greenlaw

While Greenlaw's book does not dwell on the 1991 storm in which her friends were lost, she does provide an up-close-and-personal look at the hard life at sea and the frequent loneliness of being the only female in charge of an all-male crew. She takes readers with her on a 30-day voyage, facing bad weather, equipment breakdowns, sharks and the exhaustion of 21-hour work days when the lines are set and hauled back in.

Beyond the challenge of managing a large boat, crew and supplies, as well as an intrinsic knack of knowing where the fish may be biting, Greenlaw lets you in on a strange world at sea, one in which the captain must be both psychologist, enforcer and "mom" to a sometimes unruly and aggravating crew. Hers has been a rich and unique journey and well worth tagging along.

Fatal Storm: The Inside Story of the Tragic Sydney-Hobart Race by Rob Mundle

You don't often associate high seas drama with a sailing regatta, but all that changed in 1979 with the Fastnet race off the coast of England when a severe storm converged upon the racing fleet and killed 15 sailors. An eerily similar event occurred again in December 1998 when 115 boats left Sydney, Australia's scenic harbor for the famous Sydney to Hobart Race.