Sailing the Pacific
A Voyage Across the Longest Stretch of Water on Earth, and a Journey into Its Past
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Solo sailors are widely known to be a breed apart, and here's an unforgettable book that shows just how wide a berth they give themselves from the crowds. Several years ago, Miles Hordern, a schoolteacher by training---though he had run away to sea a few times before---set sail on a twenty-eight-foot boat from New Zealand to South America, the largest uninterrupted stretch of water on earth, and into the dominion of icebergs, cyclones, and swells of monumental proportions. The trip would take him through the fjords of Patagonia, one of the last uncharted areas in the world, then north on the Peru Current before he began his homeward voyage.
Sailing the Pacific recounts that trip in prose so vivid you can almost feel the spray sting your face and the deck heave beneath your feet. Here is prose so hawser-taut that it takes you back to Conrad, Melville, and Poe, indeed all those writers whose works about the bounding main have launched countless imaginations. Hordern pauses to consider those who have gone before him, recounting the stories that have given life to this lonely and magisterial part of the world. Writers, adventurers, fictional characters, cartographers, doomed voyages from history's pages—from the Whaleship S.S. Essex to the HMS Bounty: the South Pacific drew them all, and in their way they left mark on its vast surface.
Part sailing yarn, part adventure story, part homage to an unending but beckoning horizon, Sailing the Pacific will appeal to the sailor in each one of us, whatever the way we choose to answer the ocean's call.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It isn't easy to be an adventurer these days, when most of the globe has been explored to death. But British-born sailor Hordern makes a fascinating go of it in this jaunty reminiscence. He traveled solo from New Zealand to Chile and back again in a 28-foot boat, over 18 months in the late 1990s. He narrates a gripping tale of coping with huge storms, coming face-to-face with monster U.S. warships and dealing with the loneliness of being out on the water for weeks at a time, with nothing but the BBC World Service to keep him company. Hordern's passion for sailing is obvious, and he intersperses his own stories with those of Columbus, Magellan and other professional adventurers of the past. In fact, the author keeps bumping into history along the way, such as the islands that inspired Robinson Crusoe and the South Pacific haunts where Paul Gauguin escaped to. Although it lacks the life-or-death ferocity of some recent adventure tales, Hordern's book charts a determined course of its own, describing in detail the strange daily business of a life at sea. Maps, photos.
