Book details
Sailing the Pacific
A Voyage Across the Longest Stretch of Water on Earth, and a Journey into Its Past
Author: Miles Hordern
Sailing the Pacific
$11.99
About This Book
Book Details
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.
Imprint Publisher
St. Martin's Press
ISBN
9781466871960
In The News
“Hordern writes vividly about the rhythms and sighs of life afloat, and about a landscape composed not of immovable objects but of ever-shifting wind and water.” —Daily Telegraph
“As well as an enthralling adventure, the book chronicles an inner journey of self-discovery. Hordern captures the thrill, romance, and anxieties of ocean sailing...a highly readable book by a gifted new writer. Don't miss it.” —Yachting magazine
“Not unlike Conrad, Hordern demonstrates that a sense of superfluousness often felt by the adventurous modern traveler can be---at great personal risk---transmuted into a kind of physical essentialism by excluding the rest of humanity and testing oneself, against oneself, in extremis.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Full of humor and historical insight, this book has the toughness of the classic survivor. It's the next best thing to actually going yourself.” —Global Adventure