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Singlehanded Sailing - The Experiences and Techniques of the Lone Voyagers

Richard Henderson
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Ref: BKS000070

Singlehanded Sailing offers an account of the experiences and techniques of the lone voyagers, and penetrating insights into the psychology of singlehanders, their vessels, gear, strategies, and techniques, plus vivid accounts of emergency experiences alone against the elements. The information is absorbing in its own right, but also of obvious value to a larger audience of cruising sailors who occasionally find themselves sailing singlehanded or shorthanded. Combined with a wealth of practical information is an overriding sense of the camaraderie of the sea, and Henderson's steadying hand as a master sailor and teacher.
Status: Out of print
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Price: £17.99

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A World of My Own: The First Ever Non-stop Solo Round the World Voyage

Robin Knox-Johnston
Publisher: Adlard Coles Nautical

Ref: BKS000072

On Friday 14 June 1968 Suhili, a tiny ketch, slipped almost unnoticed out of Falmouth harbour, steered by the solitary figure at her helm, Robin Knox-Johnston. Ten and half months later Suhili, paintwork peeling and rust-streaked, her once white sails weathered and brown, her self-steering gone, her tiller arm jury-rigged to the rudder head, came romping joyously back to Falmouth to a fantastic reception for Robin, who had become the first man to sail round the world non-stop single-handed. By every standard it was an incredible adventure, perhaps the last great uncomputerized journey left to man. Every hazard, every temptation to abandon the astounding voyage came Robin's way, from polluted water tanks, smashed cabin top and collapsed boom to lost self-steering gear and sheered off tiller, and all before the tiny ketch had fought her way to Cape Horn, the point of no return, the fearsome test of any seaman's nerve and determination. "A World of My Own" is Robin's uninhibited account of one of the greatest sea adventures of our time.
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Price: £9.99

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Endurance

Alfred Lansing
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Ref: BKS000256

[Copyright amazon]

When Alfred Lansing's Endurance was first published in 1959, few people in this country--or anywhere else for that matter--had heard of Shackleton or the Imperial Transantarctic Expedition of 1914. Britain's polar history had been rewritten with Shackleton airbrushed out and Captain Scott taking centre stage as the archetypal English hero who died on the Great Barrier on his long haul back from the South Pole.

If Scott's deification was almost instantaneous, Shackleton's descent into obscurity was more of a slow fade than a sudden death. He achieved a certain amount of acclaim when South, his own account of the Expedition, was published, but his legend seemed to die with him when he suffered a fatal heart attack on another trip south in 1922. His memory deserved much better. Not only was he a far better explorer than Scott, both in terms of his technical and man management capabilities, but the story of the Transantarctic expedition read like an epic out of a Boys Own annual. With his boat crushed, he led his men across the pack-ice, sailed them in open boats to Elephant Island. Once he realised there was no chance of rescue, he and four crew mates sailed a further 600 miles across the southern ocean to South Georgia where they were shipwrecked. The five men then made the first crossing of the island to reach the whaling station at Stromness. Three attempts and three and a half months later, Shackleton returned to Elephant Island to pick up the remaining men. Not a single member of either party was lost.

So we have Lansing to largely thank for Shackleton's rehabilitation. But herein lies the problem. Shackleton's story has been now been so well told both in books--especially Roland Huntford's definitive biography, and in film and TV, that even though Lansing's thrilling account, making liberal use of the diaries of several expedition members, was the first to be published it now feels all terribly familiar and adds nothing to what we already know. Even Frank Hurley's exquisite photographs which illustrate the book now engender a slight feeling of déjà vu--not least because they have already been better reproduced in a single volume published by Bloomsbury. But Lansing deserves his day in the snow and no polar library would be complete without this book. And if, by any chance, you've never previously read a word about Shackleton, this is as good a place as any to start. --John Crace
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Price: £16.99

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Cruising & Passages

Facing the Frozen Ocean

Price: £7.99

Slow Boat from China

Price: £15.95

Rough Passage

Price: £12.95

Treasured Islands - Cruising the South Seas with Robert Louis Stevenson

Price: £22.99

Return to the Sea

Price: £16.95

The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow - A Mirror odyssey from North Wales to the Black Sea

Price: £12.95

Sailing to Hemingway's Cuba

Price: £14.99

Seasoned by Salt

Price: £18.95

Seraffyn's Mediterranean Adventure

Price: £12.99