Just read a great memoir written in the 80s about a woman who sailed around the world solo. It’s made me crave more sailing yarns. Any recos, fiction or non, for books about sailing—any level of sailing literacy from newb to technical is OK!
by iloafyoualot
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Dove, by Robert L. Graham: In 1965, 16-year-old Robin Lee Graham began a solo around-the-world voyage from San Pedro, California, in a 24-foot sloop. Five years and 33,000 miles later, he returned to home port with a wife and daughter and enough extraordinary experiences to fill this bestselling book, Dove.
The sailor who fell from grace with the sea, the old man and the sea.
Try ‘Master and Commander’, Patrick O’Brian. If you like it, there are 20 more books in the series.
Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum
The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby. The author got a job on one of the last sailing ships in 1938 and completed a return trip to Australia from the UK. Very evocative, especially the return leg.
These first two books delve into sailing ships during the 15th & 16th century:
* *Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus* by Samuel Eliot Morison.
* *The Armada* by Garrett Mattingly.
*Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before* by Tony Horwitz. FWIW, I don’t like the author — now deceased — on a personal level. He’s a supercilious *ss who imagines it’s funny to lampoon others in his books. In this instance, he constantly ridicules an Australian he has ~befriended~. When he’s not doing that, however, his book is interesting.
How about a book with an ape who knows his way around a sailboat?! Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius.
And of course Treasure Island and Moby Dick are all timers.
Does diving count?
*Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II* –Robert Kurson
*Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage* –Alfred Lansing
Swallows and Amazons, and its sequels (some of which are standalone), is a wonderful series about a bunch of kids in Edwardian England whose lives revolve around adventures in boats. It will make you feel like a ten-year-old on summer vacation.
Moby Dick
My favourite sailing book recommendation is The Water in Between by Kevin Patterson, a memoir of how a broken heart led him to impulsively sail to Tahiti when he’d never sailed before.
I just read and enjoyed Wavewalker by Suzanne Heywood
Not a sailboat, but
The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas by Thor Heyerdahl