Sailing Memoir

This 148-day journey began on Darcy Gaechter’s 35th birthday. She sold her successful outdoor adventure business, upsetting her partner and boyfriend of 12 years and getting them both fired in the process. The emotional waters that would fester and erupt on the ensuing journey were often more challenging to navigate than the mighty river itself. With blistering lips and irradiated fingernails, Darcy would tackle raging Class Five whitewater for 25 days straight, barely surviving a dynamite-filled canyon being prepared for a new hydroelectric plant.

A hilarious travel memoir about a man who moved with his wife, three kids, and two pets onto a forty-six-foot sailboat for a year. He expected it to be a yearlong version of Margaritaville, but what he got was shipwrecks, bad directions, hygiene calamities, and pirate attacks (sort of). Perfect...

When you read about someone sailing around the world, it’s usually a dotcom millionaire or a professional adventurer. Brave or Stupid? tells a very different story. It’s an everyman tale about a middle-aged, seasick electrician with no money who suddenly and for no reason decides to sail around the world. It’s the story of Yanne Larsson, a man with a dream born not out of a passion for sailing or a search for identity or the need for a challenge. This is the story of a simple handshake. One of the old-fashioned, ironclad ones.

Two Years Before the Mast is a book by the American author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., written after a two-year sea voyage starting in 1834 and published in 1840. While at Harvard College, Dana had an attack of the measles that affected his vision. Thinking it might help his sight, Dana, rather than going on a Grand Tour as most of his fellow classmates traditionally did (and unable to afford it anyway), and being something of a nonconformist, left Harvard to enlist as a common sailor.

In the tradition of Sebastian Junger and Linda Greenlaw comes Captain Sig Hansen's rags-to-riches epic of his immigrant family's struggle against deadly Alaskan seas, freezing shipwrecks, and dangerously brutal conditions to achieve the American Dream Sig Hansen has been a star of the Discovery...

Inspiring and exciting, Adams's memoir recounts the personal path leading to her historic achievements: a tomboy childhood in the Oregon high desert, an early marriage and painful divorce, and a second marriage that ended when her husband died of cancer. In the wake of his death and almost by accident, Adams discovered sailing. Six weeks after her first sailing lesson, she bought a boat, and within eight months, she set out to achieve her first world record.

Unrelenting winds, carnivorous polar bears, snake nests, sweltering heat, and constant hunger. Paddling from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, following the 2,000-mile route made famous by Eric Sevareid in his 1935 classic Canoeing with the Cree, Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho faced unexpected trials, some harrowing, some simply odd. Warren's spellbinding account retraces the women's journey from inspiration to Arctic waters, giving listeners an insider view of planning a three-month canoe expedition to the successful accomplishment of the adventure of a lifetime.

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.

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.

Off the coast of Oregon, the Columbia River flows into the Pacific Ocean and forms the Columbia River Bar: a watery collision so turbulent and deadly that it’s nicknamed the Graveyard of the Pacific. Two thousand ships have been wrecked on the bar since the first European ship dared to try to cross it. Since then, the commercial importance of the Columbia River has only grown, but despite the construction of jetties on either side, the bar remains treacherous.

A thrilling memoir from the first American woman to race a sailboat solo, nonstop around the world, pushed to the limits to find her strength. When Cole Brauer sets out at age twenty-nine to become the first American woman to race solo around the world (at five feet tall, no less), she is...

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 this classic tale of true-life adventure, David and Daniel Hays, a father and son, sail 17,000 miles from Connecticut to Cape Horn and back. Together they complete this odyssey and join a select group to successfully sail the Drake Passage in a small vessel. It is also the story of conquering inner struggles as well as great distances.

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.

Helen Olson and her husband, Elmer, retired in their late forties to sail the Pacific Ocean and Oceania from 1979-1989 on a fifty-foot yacht they built themselves. "Sailing Elysium" is a personal account of that ten-year adventure, as they immersed themselves in the cultures and traditions of the local people, venturing to twenty-seven major stay-overs in twenty-one countries.

Sailing Upwind is more than just another memoir of a distinguished former naval officer's highly diverse career. This book by Admiral James "Sandy" Winnefeld is also intended to offer useful reflections regarding how he accepted and managed risk along the way, as well as a concise description of the qualities one must develop to become a successful leader. Winnefeld began his career as an F-14 fighter pilot and TOPGUN instructor, commanded an aircraft carrier, and then served in a variety of flag officer billets on the way to becoming the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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.

Few athletes hold a record comparable to that of Oscar Chalupsky. He made history at the age of fifteen as the first person to win both the Junior and Senior Ironman titles on the same day at the South African National Lifesaving Championships, he was the country’s spokesman at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and he is a multiple-times global surfski champion. No Retreat, No Surrender is an uplifting account of grit, perseverance, talent and attitude, vividly capturing the determined mindset of an inspirational sporting legend.

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.

Larry had dreamed of sailing around the world ever since he first stepped foot into a sailboat at the age of 13. He held onto that dream for 30 years, until one day he realized that "it's now or never". He left his corporate job, trading his comfortable executive life for adventure. A true story memoir packed with lessons from the ocean that served as a teacher of seamanship, personal strength, growth, leadership, and perseverance, while Larry and his crew discovered themselves, and the world.