Good Reads - Ocean Navigator

Notable New Titles: All Hands on Deck: A Modern-Day High Seas Adventure to the Far Side of the World

All Hands on Deck: A Modern-Day High Seas Adventure to the Far Side of the World by Will Sofrin Abrams Press—253 pages: $28 Will Sofrin, sailor and shipwright, was a man in a hurry. “The clock was ticking,” he writes. He and the men and women he sailed with had cleared out of Newport on what would be a 36-day, 6,000-mile voyage to California because a production company was waiting to make a movie. The year: 2002. Sofrin had signed as deckhand on Rose, a replica of an early 19th-century British frigate. The film would be called Master and Commander:…

READING THE GLASS: A Captain’s View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships

READING THE GLASS: A Captain’s View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships by Elliott Rappaport Dutton, 323 pages: $28 Works about the sea are a peculiar literary institution. The best of them offer a harsh unblinking portrait of the mariner’s essential solitude and isolation. Elliot Rappaport, shipmaster, scholar, gifted writer, does this with perception and compassion. But he also provides much more: a richly embroidered text that interweaves his narrative with a tale of wind and weather and the history of seafaring and exploration. Of particular note is his understandable obsession with storms at sea as well as his…

In Slocum’s Wake

Ocean Navigator contributor Nat Warren-White’s account of his circumnavigation aboard his Montevideo 43, Bahati, is elevated by association with Joshua Slocum’s historic work of adventure literature. Despite the huge differences, there is a comparison to be enjoyed between the two accounts and it is well worth the time to pull out Sailing Alone while reading In Slocum’s Wake. A non-technical travelogue, In Slocum’s Wake has a mission: to persuade mere mortals to follow in Bahati’s wake, to imply how much easier it is to sail on a modern boat with a crew, to thank his 50-odd crewmembers, to thank his…

Taken by the Wind Memoir of a Sailor’s Voyage in a Bygone Era

This memoir of an ocean sailing adventure by three young Americans in the 1970s, is not a swashbuckling yarn of lusty youth turned loose on the world. Mike Jacker was 22 years old when he and his friends purchased a Cal 2-30 and set out from New Orleans to journey westward across the Pacific and back, returning only just in time to start medical school and a conventional life. They were recent college graduates from educated, comfortable families in the Midwest. Theirs was not Sterling Hayden’s act of voyaging defiance – thumbing their noses at the establishment just for the…

Addicted to More Adventure: Risk is Good, Enjoy It

By Bob Shepton Independently Published, 2021 265 pages, $20, ISBN-13: 979-8521256938 How many people in their 86th year sail throughout the islands and coast of Scotland, then from England to the Canaries via Biscay and Madeira, and then make yet another cruise of Scotland in the cold and gales of autumn? And all this while also readying his latest book for publication? Of course, none other than the unstoppable polar sailor and mountaineer Bob Shepton. The Reverend Bob Shepton, an ordained minister in the Church of England, has been traversing the high seas and making first ascents of formidable walls…

Notable New Titles

Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton 368 pp; $15.76 If you’re a big fan of polar exploration and its pantheon of brave leaders –– Shackleton, Ross, Scott, Peary and Franklin –– you probably think you’ve read everything there is to know about these treacherous expeditions to unmapped regions. But you’d be wrong, because until now the story of the ill-fated Antarctic Belgica expedition has never been published in the English language. This extraordinary story of man versus nature was first inspired by a casual reference to the expedition in a 2015 magazine article that Julian Sancton…