Sailing Travel

Set in the remote arctic region of Northern Canada, this book takes listeners on a harrowing canoe voyage that results in tragedy, redemption, and, ultimately, transformation. George Grinnell was one of six young men who set off on the 1955 expedition led by experienced wilderness canoeist Art Moffatt. Poorly planned and executed, the journey seemed doomed from the start. Ignoring the approaching winter, the men became entranced with the peace and beauty of the arctic in autumn.

Young and in love, their lives ahead of them, Tami Oldham and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, set sail from Tahiti under brilliant blue skies, with Tami’s hometown of San Diego as their ultimate destination. But the two free spirits and avid sailors couldn’t anticipate that less than two weeks into their voyage, they would sail directly into one of the most catastrophic hurricanes in recorded history.

Erik and Emily skillfully reveal that it is possible to live big on a shoestring budget while giving their family an astonishing education in adventure, creativity, purpose, and grit. Told alternately by Erik and Emily, Seven at Sea is a portrait of a captivating and resilient family and a celebration of the courage it takes to head for something over the horizon.

Including stories from paradise and hard-won lessons in seamanship, Taleisin's Tales reflects back to the first miles Lin and Larry Pardey gained together on the second boat they built lovingly with teak carvel planking over sawn black locust frames. The book includes details from outfitting, provisioning, and final detailing during the early months Lin and Larry spent getting to know their new bluewater cruiser, as well as moments of melancholy as they let go of attachments to their first trusty boat.

Bound for Distant Seas begins sailing author James Baldwin's epic tale of his second circumnavigation. His story is seasoned by his adventures during his first circumnavigation in 1984-86 as told in Across Islands and Oceans. Alone with little money aboard Atom, his now-engineless 28-foot sailboat, James embarks on his odyssey without the comforts and equipment most sailors consider essential.

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.

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.

Erik Weihenmayer is the first and only blind person to summit Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth. Descending carefully, he and his team picked their way across deep crevasses and through the deadly Khumbu Icefall; when the mountain was finally behind him, Erik knew he was going to live. His expedition leader slapped him on the back and said something that would affect the course of Erik’s life: “Don’t make Everest the greatest thing you ever do.” No Barriers is Erik’s response to that challenge.

Kayak adventurer Jim Payne can’t stop running away from home. After solo trips on American and English waterways, recounted in One Inch above the Water (2008) and Discovering England (2012), Payne shares four more harrowing and humorous adventures in Worlds to Discover: Facing angry bulls and breached dams on the Connecticut River.

Richard Henry Dana, a law student turned sailor for health reasons, sailed in 1834 aboard the brig Pilgrim on a voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to California. Drawing from his journals, Two Years Before the Mast gives a vivid and detailed account, shrewdly observed and beautifully described, of a common sailor's wretched treatment at sea, and of a way of life virtually unknown at that time.

Come aboard with Heyward and Charlotte as they transform a worn-out hull into a first-class blue water cruiser. Then take off and cross oceans with them, feeling their desperation when equipment failures force ingenious workarounds in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Share the highs of navigating the crystal waters of French Polynesia and the lows of crossing pirate-infested waters in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. Travel ashore with them to places not covered in travel brochures, meet natives untouched by the modern world, and navigate the political waters of Guantanamo Bay.

The 5,000+ mile route of the Loop Cruise follows historic seaport towns, natural wilderness and coastal fishing communities on a navigable protected waterway that make it an adventure of a lifetime for boaters who dream of seeing the United States and Canada from the helm of their own boat. We were lucky enough to make this journey on our 36-foot trawler, High Life, and chronicled our voyage.

Narrated in his own voice, in this third book about his travels aboard the 28-foot sailboat Atom, James Baldwin creates an ode to the sea and to those who venture upon her in small voyaging sailboats. The Next Distant Sea continues the memoir of his second adventurous circumnavigation as begun in his earlier book Bound for Distant Seas.

In 1958, while flying from one island to another, Audrey Sutherland sees the remote and roadless northeast side of Molokai, with its spectacular sea cliffs and waterfalls. Always an adventurer, she decides that she must find a way to explore this then inaccessible area. After much study, she determines that the best way for her to navigate these treacherous sea walls is to swim while towing an inflatable kayak. This is the story of fulfilling her dream, of planning then implementing, of launching and advancing, of retreating and reconnoitering, of challenge and success.

Join cruising legends Lin and Larry Pardey as from England they proceed into the Baltic, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Germany. During their voyage they dealt with armed guards on the Polish waterfront who watched while the people greeted them with flowers and fruit. They weathered a fierce mast-under broach in a Baltic gale. And experienced great friendships found in harbors large and small.

The author of Bad Land realizes a lifelong dream as he navigates the waters of the Mississippi River in a spartan sixteen-foot motorboat, producing yet another masterpiece of contemporary American travel writing.

Stuart Woods had never owned more than a dinghy before setting out on one of the world's most demanding sea voyages, navigating single-handedly across the Atlantic. How, at the age of 37, did this self-proclaimed novice go from small ponds to the big sea? Now with a new afterword that looks back at how one transatlantic race changed his life, Woods takes listeners on a spectacular journey not just of traveling across the world, but of being tried in fire, learning by accepting challenges, appreciating the beauty of the open water, and living to tell about it.

Leaving her garden to the mercy of the slugs, award-winning writer Alys Fowler set out in an inflatable kayak to explore Birmingham's canal network, full of little-used waterways where huge pike skulk and kingfishers dart. Her book is about noticing the wild everywhere and what it means to see beauty where you least expect it. What happens when someone who has learned to observe her external world in such detail decides to examine her internal world with the same care?

Here, for the first time, is a complete and chronological account: everything from levitating the dog and navigating by smell to meeting his wife Tamsin through the Lonely Hearts column of Time Out and attempting to run away to sea and raise a family on a 27 foot boat.

Pioneering whitewater explorer Wick Walker examines what lured a generation of incredibly daring pioneers into some of Earth's most wondrous yet forbidding river canyons: below Victoria Falls on the Zambezi; the Great Bend of the Tsangpo in Tibet; Tiger Leaping Gorge on the Yangtze; the flanks of Mount Everest; and more. Loaded with great moments and personal stories, Wick details what these adventurers found there, and within themselves.