Boat Books: Recommendations?

[Philpott]

"In the worst of weathers, I’ve never felt the remotest ill will from the sea, or the least recognition. The ocean, like water in a glass, is absolutely impersonal. It makes no distinction between you and your little dreamboat, filled with your photo albums and all your hopes, and the windblown larva of a mayfly, or a barnacle, or a Styrofoam coffee cup. You’re just there. The sea is doing its thing. You deal with it as well as you can, with your weather forecasts, your alarm clock, your sextant and chronometer and the rest of your bags of tricks."

Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat
Peter Nichols

[Wylieguy]

Halfway between pain and paradise lives the sailor on San Francisco Bay. He has books to tell how to set sails, how to trim sails, how to take sails down. He has books to tell how to navigate to Bora Bora, but nothing to tell how to navigate out of the Berkeley Circle sideways, laid flat, soaked and chilled and thrilled and living in pain and living in paradise all at the same time. Halfway is what you get when you average the two. It is a common state of the San Francisco Bay sailor.

This book will not teach you how to sail. Sailing will teach you how to sail. This book will not teach you about currents. The struggle will teach you. This book will teach instead a few holds and a few escapes. It will wish you well. It will provide a few hard-won insights from one who has traveled the road from the Marina Green, looking out to that beautiful Bay and saying, Lord, transport me there.

SAILING THE BAY
Kimball Livingston

[mike cunningham]

I sailed with a free wind day after day, marking the position of my ship on the chart with considerable precision; but this was done by intuition, I think, more than by slavish calculations. For one whole month my vessel held her course true; I had not, the while, so much as a light in the binnacle. The Southern Cross I saw every night abeam. The sun every morning came up astern; every evening it went down ahead. I wished for no other compass to guide me, for these were true. If I doubted my reckoning after a long time at sea I verified it by reading the clock aloft made by the Great Architect, and it was right.

Joshua Slocum
Sailing Alone Around The World