Home from Distant Seas: The 28-Foot Sailboat Atom Completes Her Second Circumnavigation (Unabridged‪)‬

Home from Distant Seas completes the trilogy of books by James Baldwin recounting his 25 years of live-aboard cruising adventures. The author creates a tribute to the sea and to those who venture upon her in small voyaging sailboats as he describes his personal journey of survival and discovery at sea as well as the sailors and local people he met along the way. 

Continuing here with the memoir of his second adventurous circumnavigation begun in his earlier books Bound for Distant Seas and The Next Distant Sea, the author makes his way slowly, at times reluctantly, homeward from South Africa to the United States. He encounters a fierce storm off the Cape of Good Hope that tests his boat and his seamanship, then sails across the South Atlantic to Brazil and the Caribbean isles where he marries, and ultimately finds a new home port on the US East coast.

On his journey Baldwin interviews some extraordinary characters who befriended him, ranging from a family of treasure hunters and island traders roaming the Indian Ocean on a Polynesian-style catamaran, to a married couple who sailed alone around the world together on two separate boats, a man who wintered alone aboard his sailboat in Antarctica, to an 80-year-old sailor who had just completed an Atlantic crossing in a unique home-built leeboarder. In his matter-of-fact style, Baldwin brings you all the colors and characters of humanity—the good, the bad, and the downright bizarre. As their stories meld with his own, Home from Distant Seas provides insight into those intrepid individuals who lead their lives on distant seas. In the end, James Baldwin’s story is less a treatise on how to sail than a description and endorsement of a way of life.