Protagonist Emmeline “Em” Ridge is a boat delivery captain of limited experience. Newly widowed, her husband having died in a kayak accident, she lives on a tidal island just east of Portland, Maine, ...
Arrow’s Fall, by Joel Scott (ECW Press, 2019; 340 pages) Good Old Boat uses affiliate links and may earn a small commission if you purchase anything after clicking through one of them. This com...
Peter Brennan has “wrung more salt water out of his socks than most of us have sailed over.” This memoir encompasses 10 voyages the author has made aboard his Pearson 30, Happy Times; on Mists ...
Modern sailors are driven by the challenge of crossing big waters, to see what is on the other side of the horizon. But back in the 16th century, the men crossing the Atlantic Ocean wanted only one th...
It is Race Week in the Salish Sea, north-northwest of Seattle, Washington. This is important to many of the characters in Antonio Hopson’s novel Nefarious, but not because they want to win any of the ...
Contrary to the title, this is not a book about how to anchor. This is a book on how to select and size the gear required for anxiety-free anchoring. As such, it is a great resource. Like all good eng...
Lana and her best friend, Kitty, both fleeing dysfunctional families, are young wanderers exploring the Far East. They discover the yacht The Blue and join its crew of similar free spirits, young peop...
Full Disclosure: I learned about this book when Mr. Geudtner hired my wife to proofread the manuscript (tip to aspiring writers: marry an English major). The sailing questions and occasional chortles ...
One of my favorite cautionary sea stories comes from Marlin Bree’s Wake of the Green Storm. Author of five nonfiction books about sailing, Dead on the Wind is his first novel, a thriller set in ...
Edmund A. “Ed” Cutts was an exceptionally single-minded individual. As a very young child, he watched boats off Long Island. He took his first boat ride when he was 8½ years old. When he w...
In this age of College Sports = Football = Big Business, it is hard to believe that crew — races between boats with two, four, or eight rowers—was one of the most popular collegiate sports in the 1930...
In 2010, naval historian Sam Willis went to the British Library to do research for a book he was writing. One of the potential sources he wished to check had the innocuous catalog label “Add:232...
The normal Atlantic hurricane season does not start until August, but “Climate is what we expect; weather is what we get.” In May 2007, two low-pressure centers spun together off Cape Hatt...
Jimmy Cornell Lived the Dream: While in England in 1974, he bought a bare hull, finished and outfitted it, then spent the next seven years sailing Aventura around the world. This is not his story. Acc...
The Freakin’ Old Guys (FOGs for short, and that first word isn’t the one they use) are a group of older sailors doing a messabout in the San Juan Islands. There is Gibson Stanford, known as Gib, retir...
The Limbus of the Moon is a novel in the mold of a Dan Brown thriller, or at least it tries to be. Viator venenatusis a sea urchin, very rare, incredibly valuable, and possibly the source of life-savi...
This book by Charles and Corinne Kanter, the daring duo of the title, is the ninth they have written about their lives (married 54 years!) spent mostly sailing in mostly catamarans, along the East Coa...
BY NICHOLAS COGHLAN (UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS, 2011; 496 PAGES, 4 MAPS, 48 PHOTOGRAPHS; $34.95) REVIEW BY CHAS. HAGUE DES PLAINES, ILLINOIS In 1978, newly graduated Nicholas Coghlan and his girlfri...
In 1978, newly graduated Nicholas Coghlan and his girlfriend Jenny moved to Buenos Aires to take a job at a private English school. While there, they traveled extensively on the continent, including a...
Derrick Hampton seems to want to be another Jimmy Buffet but that’s okay. The world needs more talented singers writing about sailing, and the sun is always over the spreaders somewhere . . . Mo...
Those of you who have read Paul “Capt’n Pauley” Esterle’s articles in Good Old Boat and his column in Small Craft Advisor are already familiar with the kinds of things that he has develope...
Most of the stories about adventure on the high seas — be they Hornblower, Aubrey, Amanda Garrett, or Richard Sharpe* — have several items in common: a young, smart, daring hero; an older subordinate ...
Those of you Good Ol’ Boat readers who listen to NPR may be aware of commentator Bailey White. Turns out she had a brother named Robb White who was a science teacher, a boatbuilder, a man who loved to...
Smart boaters who have taken a boating safety course, either through the Power Squadron or the Coast Guard Auxiliary, will have learned what they should and should not do on the water. Really smart bo...
Daniel Robb is a carpenter, actor, teacher, an expert on the Transcendentalists, a sailor, and shipwright. He is also a wonderfully skilled writer, all of which makes his book, Sloop, a great read. Da...
In 1995, a small group of historians, writers, and National Park Service workers did two things: first, they founded the United States Life-Saving Service Heritage Association, a group dedicated to pr...
Ben Pester and his friends, Jeremy Burnett and Fraser Currie (aggregate age: 193 years) had an objective. They wanted to explore the waterways off Tierra del Fuego and celebrate the turn of the Millen...
Hundreds of cruisers have sailed from California down the coast of Mexico. Few have been as prepared as Garry and Carol Domnisse. Garry spent 30 years in the U.S. Coast Guard. Carol is a registered nu...