Sailing Memoir

Tired of California's glitzy lifestyle, greed, and urban sprawl, Captain Skip Rowland sells everything to drift and blend in the drop dead beauty of the South Pacific. But before casting-off, his yacht is stolen and set ablaze on a desolate Mexican shore. Skip, recently in the USMC, captures the thieves, sailing later in a new yacht with his son and nurse girlfriend. They accidentally sail into an active military coup d'état, are chased by a vagabond freighter, make love on picture-perfect uninhabited islands, and cross the Tasman Sea to Australia in the worst weather in 100 years.

On Christmas Eve 2013, off the coast of East Antarctica, an abrupt weather change trapped the Shokalskiy - the ship carrying earth scientist Chris Turney and 71 others involved in the Australasian Antarctic Expedition - in a densely packed armada of sea ice, 1400 miles from civilization. With the ship's hull breached and steerage lost, the wind threatened to drive the vessel into the frozen continent, smashing it to pieces.

You will be challenged and inspired as you join Neville on board for this real-life, white-knuckle adventure on the high seas....A magnificent account of courage and perseverance as a young doctor takes time off from his busy practice to sail a 31' yacht (single-handed much of the way) from England to New Zealand.

After being diagnosed with a rare, usually fatal cancer, Alder Allensworth made a miraculous recovery and took on a sailing journey most would only dream of. Having lost one eye to cancer, Alder dedicated herself to this 1,200-mile trip to raise money and awareness for sailors with disabilities, and quickly realized that sailing the 12-foot Prevail from Florida to Maine presented a whole new set of challenges that she had never encountered before, even on the water. Prevail: Celebrate the Journey follows Alder’s story from her diagnosis through her sailing expedition.

In the spring of 1992 (eight years before the publication of In the Heart of the Sea), Nat Philbrick was in his late 30s, living with his family on Nantucket, feeling stranded and longing for the thrill of victory of a national sailing championship he had won 15 years earlier. Was it a midlife crisis? It was certainly a watershed for the journalist turned stay-at-home dad, who impulsively decided to throw his hat into the ring, or water, again.

Solo circumnavigation of the globe. Fewer than 300 sailors in history have accomplished it, less than the number of people who have climbed Mt. Everest, or even those who have gone to space. In 1990, Istvan Kopar set out to earn his place among this elite fraternity - and to do so with only one stop.

Interwoven with legends and lore, this story chronicles one man's adventure on Lake Superior, one of the world's most dangerous bodies of water.

In 2016, Sandy Winterbottom embarked on an epic six-week tall-ship voyage from Uruguay to Antarctica. At the mid-way stop in South Georgia, her pristine image of the Antarctic was shattered when she discovered the dark legacy of twentieth century industrial-scale whaling. Enraged by what she found, she was quick to blame the men who undertook this whole scale slaughter, but then she stumbled upon the grave of an eighteen-year-old whaler from Edinburgh who she could not allow to bear the brunt of blame. There are two sides to every story.

This enthralling audiobook takes us on a tour of the most dangerous, exciting, and often eccentric escapades of literature's sailing stars and how these true stories inspired and informed their best-loved works. Arthur Ransome, Erskine Childers, Jack London, and many others are featured as we find out how extraordinary fact fed into unforgettable fiction.

Uffa Fox was the most celebrated and successful yacht designer in the world. Much more than a sailor and boat designer, he was an irrepressible extrovert and novel thinker, as well as a singer, musician, journalist, author, painter, sportsman, campaigner, controversial businessman, and friend of royalty. In the years since his death, his reputation has grown rather than diminished.

The former captain from the reality TV show “Wicked Tuna Outer Banks”. Dale Lisi has compiled several aspects of considerable consequence that have taken place in his life and assembled them into literary form in "Good and Evil". Traveling to desolate remote regions, deliberately placing himself in life threatening situations; the mountains in the winter, the desert, and taking his 24' boat over 200 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean until it ran out of fuel and then attempted to sink it - no radio, no food, no life raft.

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Monopolists, the incredible story of Olympic sailor Kevin Hall and the psychiatric syndrome that makes him believe he stars in a television show of his life.

Normality is so over-rated. Boat life is better. In her debut memoir Narrow Margins, Marie Browne saved her family from financial ruin by moving her long-suffering husband, three children, and a dog on to a houseboat called Happy Go Lucky in search of a less stressful, alternative way of life. Now in Narrow Minds the family find themselves sucked back into normality, they’re pretty much back where they started: horrible house, no boat, and the kids are beginning to threaten mutiny.

Narrow Margins is the true story of one family's journey from the financial crash of the Rover car company to an alternative and better lifestyle. Faced with the loss of everything - the house, the cars, and more importantly, their rather lazy and indolent lifestyle - Marie Browne and her family took on the challenge of a whole new way of life. Strapped for cash, the family buy a decrepit 70ft barge called Happy Go Lucky which had been run as a floating hotel.

Author Jeff Spevak was confronted with a dilemma: How do you tell the story of a man who can’t bring himself to talk about the most epic moment of his life? A clever fellow who’d scrapped to survive in a fashion that seems quaint today, Coleman tested himself as a teenager by swimming across lakes, building homes from foraged lumber, and running a navy carpentry shop as though he were a member of the scamming crew of McHale’s Navy. He was a self-taught sailor who’d become a legend on Lake Ontario. At age 96, Ernie was still sailing.

Two Years Before the Mast, written by Richard Henry Dana, provides a vivid account of "the life of a common sailor at sea". Dana sails from Boston, around Cape Horn, stopping in several ports along the California coast including San Diego, San Pedro, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. On the return trip around Cape Horn in the middle of the Antarctic winter Dana describes terrifying storms and incredible beauty, giving vivid descriptions of icebergs and the scurvy that afflicts members of the crew.

A true story of courage and survival, South to Alaska carries listeners from the heartland of America to the last frontier... the hard way. Born in the dusty heart of Oklahoma in 1916, 10-year-old Melvin sees a photograph of a cabin in the Alaska wilderness in his fourth-grade geography book and dreams of living there. Nearly 50 years later he builds a 47-foot boat in his Arkansas backyard, launches it on the Arkansas River, and cruises 10,000 miles to Alaska by way of the Panama Canal. Melvin has never been south of the United States/Mexico border.

Feel the adrenaline rush as Dave Norell plunges over huge waterfalls, gets lost in the Philippine jungles, and experiences carnage in Costa Rica. In need of medical attention, Dave and his extreme kayaking friends trudge through waist-high sugar cane fields full of poisonous snakes, in search of a road that hasn't been washed out by recent flood-waters. Dave and fellow kayakers travel throughout Idaho, British Columbia, other parts of Canada and the US in their quest for whitewater adventure.

Boat Girl is the heartbreaking memoir of growing up aboard a sailboat. Throughout the 1980's and 90's, Melanie's family lived aboard a 47-foot sailboat, spending their summers along the US East Coast and their winters in the Bahamas. But the cruising life was not all fun in the sun. The family had to work hard to pay for their way of life. They dodged hurricanes, overzealous federal agents and bullying land-kids. And they endured a boatload of family drama.

Here is the inspiring story of a man who overcame childhood polio to live an adventure-filled life as captain of Maine's most famous windjammer, the schooner Adventure, now a national historic landmark in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Captain Jim shares his adventures afloat, his battles with bureaucracy, and even how he created one of Maine's most unusual restaurants.