Loved! Would recommend it to anyone who loves to be on the water and has an adventurous spirit...

Great book about father/son adventure and their relationship as they sail to Cape Horn.
Easy read and learned alot about the world of sailing.

Thoroughly enjoyable two-person memoir of a father-son sailing trip around the horn, which as good memoirs do, tells us much more about the authors than just that they went a-sailing.

I loved this story about a father and son's relationship while aboard a sailboat...don't want to spoil it for you... it's a true story!

Father and son, mother and son, father and daughter, mother, son and daughter... these familial collaborations are the sort of writing one might tend to avoid. However, with the backdrop of sailing around Cape Horn on a small boat, My Old Man and the Sea seemed worth a chance and was time well spent. The collaborative writing of David (father) and Daniel (son) Hays offering their own perspectives of the journey was entertaining, especially when dealing with more challenging moments. Both Hays's like to delve into the nitty-gritty of their boat, equipment and supplies and for those who are not nautically minded, the sample chart of schematics of their boat, the Sparrow are very helpful. One might complain that too many words and too much time are devoted to father and son reminiscing of years past and debating whether David was a good Dad and/or Daniel a good son are debated. But this was as much a part of the journey as sailing through the rolling waves and gale force winds around the Cape. In spite of the familial distractions and inventory reports, My Old Man and the Sea is an entertaining, mostly enjoyable read.

My Old Man and the Sea by David and Daniel Hays is about a father and son (respectively) and the growth of their love and respect for each other, and perhaps not inconsistently, the flowering of their independence. That in itself is not so unusual, but most fathers and sons don't build 25 ft sailing yachts to sail around Cape Horn.
The tip of South America has probably the worst weather for any kind of sea vessel of any place on earth. It can take months to beat and tack back and forth against the howling winds that sweep unhindered by any land mass around the bottom of the globe. They were not so foolish as to sail from east to west, so they took a short cut through the Canal on to Easter Island then back around from the west via the Horn. Their voyage covered 17,000 miles and lasted 317 days.

They had an interesting system of reefing the sails for various kinds of weather. It was color-coded with a mnemonic system that related to fear levels. "Red for the first reef stands for 'mere general fear.' [fifteen knot wind] If it blows over twenty, one turns green with nauseating terror, and secures the green line, which is the second reef. Next if it's blowing over thirty knots and shock has set in (the blood has left your extremities), you pull the blue line for the third reef. If the wind picks up more than that, you're scared to death. White is appropriate. That makes the sail tiny."

The voyage continues as father and son explore their past and prior relationship. David remembers Dan's constant pranks at boarding school that necessitated a plea to the headmaster for reinstatement. Dan fears his father's age and other inadequacies - cooking is a jointly recognized incompetence of his, only half-jokingly referred to as "time spent in the galley area, after which, the food scraped out of the utensils and off the walls is served."

David speculates why small boat voyages became a British specialty after the war: " ... the cold and damp and bad food on a tiny boat were indistinguishable from home; they didn't realize that they weren't in their living rooms."

A great father and son story, starting (well almost) with a Melville quote from the father:

Sailor or landsman, there is some sort of a Cape Horn for all.
Boys! beware of it; prepare for it in time. Gray-beards! thank God it is
passed. And ye lucky livers, to whom, by some rare fatality, your Cape
Horns are placid as Lake Lemans, flatter not yourselves that good luck
is judgment and discretion; for all the yolk in your eggs, you might
have foundered and gone down, had the Spirit of the Cape said the word

David and Daniel Hays kit out one of the smallest boats ever to sail around Cape Horn and start their journey. The story alternates between generational/father and son viewpoints. If you like sailing reads, this is both a wonderful sailing read, and a wonderful father and son story.

Interesting if somewhat rambling tale of a family history, racism in the US and sailing around the Cape Horn in a boat under 30 feet. It almost seemed anti-climatic by the time the feat was accomplished, but a good read.

this technically has two authors - the dad's parts I would give a 3 but the son's parts are a solid 4

I picked up this book on the recommendation of a sailor in Fish Creek Wisconsin. I will give credit where it is due: sailing around Cape Horn in a twenty five foot boat is impressive. That being said, the book was less of a triumph. It lost me several times, hence the low rating.

This is an easy read and a great story not only about sailing around Cape Horn in a small boat and the father-son dynamic but also about life and taking risks. The father and son entries about daily life on a small sailboat are well done but I was taken by their reflections on living and dying. Granted they were experienced sailors, the father had sailed back and forth across the Atlantic, but to choose to sail such a small boat in such a dangerous place when one could lose their life was interesting to reflect on. The book is not all serious reflections. The pair share their adventures on shore at their various stops. Easter Island was particularly interesting. I would recommend viewing the Appendix first to understand all the sail talk and to get a good sense of how small the boat was.

Interesting read, not as detailed as I might have like, but a good read none-the-less.