Graveyard of the Pacific: Shipwreck and Survival on America’s Deadliest Waterway by Randall Sullivan There are many North American inlets out there that at times can be difficult, even dangerous. I on...
The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World’s Oceans by Laura Trethewey Sailors don’t use “maps” for navigating, we use charts. So why review a book called The Deepest Map? The short answ...
Readers who enjoyed Bert Vermeer’s review of the Vancouver 27 in the September/October 2023 issue of Good Old Boat will get a kick out of best-selling author Donald Hamilton’s Cruises with Kathleen: M...
This is not a sailing story. As a matter of fact, there are only three scenes that occur aboard sailing ships — all epic, which makes it a worthwhile read for sailors. From start to finish, Hold Fast ...
Memoir of a Sailor’s Voyage in a Bygone Era San Juan, Puerto Rico. My husband Tom and I and our crew member sit at outside tables in the old city. We have cold drinks before us and she is lookin...
This first-person narrative will not, contrary to the title, actually teach you how to build a boat. Rather, Jonathan Gornall tells the tale of his personal quest to construct a traditional clinker-bu...
It is a tale oft told, a bright and promising voyage of brave young people who sail off to conquer terra incognita, well equipped and well led, only to be taught cruel and tragic lessons by the extrem...
This is a remarkable story of one couple’s 17-year, 40,000-mile adventure that chronicles their sail from British Columbia to Lake Ontario the long way around. That is, heading west via French Polynes...
The subtitle of this new book is enticing: “The fine art of selecting a great boat, outfitting it, living aboard, and cruising it on a minimal budget.” If you find this resonates with your adventure g...
The late Bruce Kirby was one of the most influential yacht designers of the 20th century. Though known primarily for the Laser, his design career lasted over 40 years in two countries and spanned a ra...
When Tim Severin died at 80 in December 2020, I thought, “I know that name. He wrote stories about the sea.” The particular book that came to mind was this one, The Brendan Voyage, which recounts an A...
This classic nautical book is aimed squarely at Good Old Boat readers, despite being written decades before Good Old Boat magazine came to be. The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float is not so much a tale of man ...
During these COVID-19 days of isolation, this 17,000-mile voyage by a father and son on a 25-foot engineless sloop, has the effect of making our stay-at-home confinement seem downright luxurious in co...
Home From Distant Seas is the final volume in James Baldwin’s Distant Seas trilogy, documenting the completion of his 13-year circumnavigation aboard Atom, his 1963 28-foot Pearson Triton. We follow B...
As I write this review, I am a few weeks into a winter move to the Maine coast. The picture window to my right is dark at 4 pm, and the house shivers under a squirrely wind gusting over the island tha...
To the experienced sailors out there who have read the addictive narratives of Cook, Ross, Amundsen, and Shackleton, and who have dreamed of their own voyage to extreme latitudes, your book has been w...
Sundowners in paradise? Check. Uncertainty? Check. Doubt? Check. Relationship drama? Check. Check. Check. Plunge is an apt title for this cruising narrative as the author doesn’t simply dribble ...
This book, aptly subtitled, “Fiberglass Boats and the Men Who Made Them,” is the bible of the fiberglass boatbuilding industry. And Dan Spurr is the prophet to write it. Dan is Good Old Boat magazine’...
As the title makes clear, this is a book of 27 unforgettable stories. Having just read this book, I realize I’ve already forgotten most of them. Then again, my rusty old brain does not remember things...
It’s amazing to think that no scholars atop the masthead of Melville studies had thought until now to undertake the systematic cataloging of the ways in which Moby-Dick reflects the 19th century mind ...
What do you do when you’ve prepared for a single-handed around-the-world sailboat competition, have a great 40-foot high-performance boat ready to go… and then the race is called off? Go. That’s what ...
Rarely do I really enjoy a cruising memoir that melds a family story with descriptions of white-knuckled adventure. I also tend to identify with solo sailors or the male half of a cruising couple, bei...
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, ...
Author and Olympic sailor Carol Newman Cronin’s fourth novel, Ferry to Cooperation Island, takes readers to a fictional setting in Rhode Island Sound between the real Block Island and Newport, where t...
This is the perfect book for these times. When you can’t get out cruising on your own boat (very far, anyway), voyage logs like this one help to cure stuck-on-land blues. The title doesn’t lie: it’s t...
“We are inching toward the middle of nowhere,” reads an entry in Michael’s log of the cruise of Juliet, a CSY 44 sailboat that is carrying the Partlow family of four through the San Blas Islands of Pa...
Laura S. Wharton’s debut novel The Pirate’s Bastard, is set in colonial America in the first half of the 18th Century. This was an exciting place, especially for a young, ambitious man like Edward Mar...
I wonder how many sailors secretly long for a relationship with, or owning or at least experiencing, a wooden boat. Though most sailboat owners nurture fiberglass craft, my guess is that deep down ins...
Amongst the hundreds of sailors I’ve known, only one kept the same boat nearly his entire life; she was a sweet 17-foot Silhouette, with bilge keels, that my friend Bob maintained flawlessly, a...
A good writer doesn’t tell readers their story, they show readers their story. I know that Randy Baker succeeded on this front because I felt like I was almost aboard with he and his wife, Cheryl, whe...
