I enjoyed because I love sailing and the ocean. Nothing profound, just enjoyable.

more interesting than I expected! It alternates between father and son journal-type entries. I preferred the son's entries - they were less about sailing and more about twentysomething angst. But both talk about the father-son relationship quite a bit and that was fascinating for me as a female to read. So different from Mom/daughter relationship. It was also very eye-opening to understand how much work is required for such a journey. Highly recommend for sailors; recommend to most others as well.

Great tale of father and son sailing together in a small sail boat around Cape Horn. True story. I'm a sucker for a good sea yarn...

read this years ago, liked it enough to keep. I've been reading a number of sailing stories of late, so I pulled it from the shelf to just "read a couple chapters"- and couldn't put it down! Wonderful story of endurance sailing, family, and human nature.

A sailor's book....thank you both.

Wonderful / Short, but full of symbols. The love between the boy and the old man is really touching. The resolve to die with the fish is also cool.

It's an autobiography about a dude and his dad sailing from Maine, through the Panama Canal, around the tip of Cape Horn, and back to Maine again. Great book if you like sailing or travel/adventure type books.

I have owned this book for a few years and finally read it, and totally enjoyed it. The story of a man and his son sailing a boat around Cape Horn is a cracking good sea story, and this is non fiction at its best.

This book was fascinating. It's published as journal entries. You learn a lot about sailing and geography, and I always love a true story.

This is a book written by two authors. Subtitled ‘A father and son sail round Cape Horn’ – as the voyage progresses, each contributes sometimes a paragraph, sometimes several pages. The maps are clear and helpful; though I’d have preferred all maps to have been grouped to fold-out from the front-inside. I temporarily solved that problem by keeping a pad of multi-coloured adhesive page markers to hand.

The older man is a highly respected theatre director, and a graduate of Harvard. The younger is a field supervisor at a therapeutic wilderness programme for troubled teenagers in Idaho. Very different – or are they? The relationship is spiced-up by the father’s carefully weighed deliberate decision to appoint his son captain of the ship. Why? David’s handing over that control is, entirely appropriately, never explicitly answered. The reader is left to engage with a fascinating puzzle, constructing his/her own theories from the evidence presented.

Accompanied by a last-minute furry gift, a spirited male kitten named ‘Tiger’, the good ship ’Sparrow’ makes her way from The Idea, … to Panama, … to the Galápagos, … Easter Island, … and thus round the Horn and back via the Falklands (British) and home to New London, Connecticut. It’s a great voyage; and certainly no holiday cruise. In different ways the libido of both men; and Force 10 sailing conditions round Cape Horn, see to that!

The power relationship between the two men and their natural affection for Tiger (despite his developing a taste for chewing electrical wiring) is charmingly amusing. The sheer technical and practical competence needed to stack the odds in favour of survival includes a wonderfully humorous account of cooking (pp.113-114) six hundred miles away from the Galápagos. However, and probably irrationally, I do wish that I hadn’t read the account of tourism on Easter Island. The necessity of a population trading in order to survive in moderate comfort is entirely understandable; yet is surely to be regretted when and where intangible spiritual qualities of Paradise are threatened?

By no means is this a wholly serious book; and it’s all the better for that. However once round Cape Horn, I thought the narrative descended a purr flat, and a whisker sentimental. Relief? American nature? Lack of a clear follow-on goal? Lack of that cat? Hard to know, really.

Wistful?

book club

Wonderful story! Well written. Really gives you a feel for what life is like aboard a sailing vessel. After listening to this story I understand the adventure that sailing brings and what might draw someone to a life at sea.