Survival Stories

After the Storm

John Rousmaniere
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Ref: BKS000049

After the Storm is John Rousmaniere's most ambitious work ever, the unique expression of a master storyteller.
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Price: £8.99

Type of Cover: Paperback (£10.56 Including VAT) Hardback (£17.61 Including VAT)

66 Days Adrift - a true story of disaster and survival in the open sea

William Butler
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Ref: BKS000041

The lure of paradise was unmistakable, and Bill Butler was on a quest to find it with his wife Simonne—riding the Pacific currents on their sloop Siboney, with a world of possibilities ahead. But, twelve hundred miles from land, the alluring ocean showed its deadly side when, without warning, a pod of pilot whales attacked their sailboat, battering it until it sank beneath the waves.
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Price: £8.99

The Last Voyage of the Lucette

Douglas Robertson ( Fwd. Sir Robin Knox-Johnston)
Publisher: Seafarer Books

Ref: BKS000161

In their schooner Lucette, the Robertson family sailed from Falmouth in January 1971. 18 months out, in the middle of the Pacific, Lucette was holed by killer whales and sank.
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Price: £13.95

Aka

Tristan Jones
Publisher: Seafarer Books

Ref: BKS000132

Bill Conan, a middle-aged adventurer, has entered a 30,000-mile solo race around the world - his last chance to win status and success. His course leads him across the Atlantic, to disaster. Overboard, in the open sea, things look bad, but then comes Aka and his dolphin tribe, who work to keep him alive.
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Price: £12.99

Let Me Survive - A true story

Louise Longo (Transl. Alison Anderson)
Publisher: Seafarer Books

Ref: BKS000138

While cruising in the Bay of Biscay, 1994, Louise and Bernard Longo, and their six-year old daughter, Gaëlla, ran into a storm of such violence that Bernard decided they would be safer in their liferaft. Only Louise survived that tragic error of judgement, to be rescued after weeks of hunger, thirst, guilt, agony and despair.
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Price: £14.95

Survive the Savage Sea

Dougal Robertson
Publisher: Seafarer Books

Ref: BKS000160

After their schooner was sunk by killer whales, the six members of the Robertson family spent 38 days adrift in the Pacific, first in a liferaft, then aboard a tiny dinghy.
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Price: £12.95

Rescue and Recovery - Iskra's ordeal in the Hebrides

Frank Mulville
Publisher: Seafarer Books

Ref: BKS000144

Frank Mulville, twice prizewinner for the best book of the sea, sets off on a summer voyage to Spain and France. Disaster overtakes them when Iskra is torn from her mooring in a fierce gale.
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Price: £8.95

Total Loss - A collection of 45 first-hand accounts of yacht losses at sea

Jack Coote (Edited by Paul Gelder)
Publisher: Adlard Coles Nautical

Ref: BKS000023

A collection of 50 dramatic stories of yachts lost at sea. First published in 1985, Jack Coote's book of first-hand accounts has been comprehensively updated and revised, with the addition of more than 20 new stories.
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Price: £14.99

Castaway in Paradise - the incredible adventures of true-life Robinson Crusoes

James C Simmons
Publisher: Seafarer Books

Ref: BKS000163

The figure of the castaway is one of the most powerful in our literary heritage. This book explores the reality behind the myth - the gripping, true stories of people who, because of shipwrecks, perfidious sea captains, or their own choice, found themselves marooned. From Alexander Selkirk, Defoe's model for Robinson Crusoe, to Tom Neale, a drifter from New Zealand who became the hermit of Suwarrow.
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Price: £12.95

South: The Endurance Expedition: The "Endurance" Expedition

Sir Ernest Shackleton (Photo: F. Jack Hurley)
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Ref: BKS000255

A first-hand account of the Endurance expedition, this text tells the tale of Shackleton's expedition to the South Pole as World War I broke out in Europe. Their ship, the Endurance, was crushed and the men were forced to survive in and escape from one of the world's most hostile environments. Traversing glaciers, scaling cliffs and crossing treacherous seas in open boats, all the time threatened by cold and hunger, the men, through their own strength and Shackleton's experience, all made it to safety.
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Price: £8.99

Fastnet Force 10

John Rousmaniere
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Ref: BKS000087

John Rousmaniere has sailed in over 35,000 miles of offshore voyaging and racing. He crewed on the 48-foot Toscana in the fateful Fastnet Race of 1979.
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Price: £11.95

Schooner Integrity

Frank Mulville
Publisher: Seafarer Books

Ref: BKS000145

From the accounts of Integrity's owner, Waldo Howland, and the crew who abandoned her, Frank Mulville pieces together the whole story - with a first-hand account of the climax.
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Price: £8.95

Classic Sailing Stories - Fifteen Incredible Tales of the Sea

Ed. Tom McCarthy
Publisher: The Lyons Press

Ref: BKS000248

Few people would want to test their mettle in an ice-encrusted boat with Ernest Shackleton, sail the Straits of Magellan with Joshua Slocum, or watch with Owen Chase as an angry whale sends his ship to the bottom, thousands of miles from the nearest land. But it's quite another thing to read these true accounts while settled into a favorite chair.
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Price: £7.95

A Single Wave - Stories of Storms and Survival

Webb Chiles
Publisher: Seafarer Books

Ref: BKS000117

Tales from the author's own experience of surviving capsizes, swampings and shipwrecks in many oceans.
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Price: £14.99

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

Voices from the Sea: Remarkable Encounters with the World's Oceans

Nic Compton (Foreword: Alex Thomson)
Publisher: Cassell Illustrated

Ref: BKS000080

Record-setting races, voyages of exploration, epic battles with the weather and shipwreck survivals are just some of the tales told in "Voices from the Sea".
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Price: £25.00

Berserk - My Voyage to the Antarctic in a Twenty-Seven-Foot Sailboat

David Mercy
Publisher: The Lyons Press

Ref: BKS000249

In Berserk, author David Mercy brilliantly recounts what it is like to experience the seemingly endless pounding of wind and waves, the solitary four-hour shifts of cold bleak darkness, and the delicate balance of personalities where a potentially murderous mutiny is always in the making.
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Price: £7.99

The Greatest Sailing Stories Ever Told - Twenty-Seven Unforgettable Stories

E. Christopher Caswell
Publisher: The Lyons Press

Ref: BKS000250

For thousands of years, man has sailed into battle, sailed for rumored wealth, and sailed for pure adventure. And for nearly as long, stories about the sea have entertained, intrigued, and inspired readers. The Greatest Sailing Stories Ever Told brings together some of the most compelling writing of the millennium.
Status: Temporarily unavailable
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Price: £9.99

Fatal Storm

Rob Mundle
Publisher: A & C Black

Ref: BKS000029

One of the world’s three great ocean sailing competitions, the annual 600-mile race from Sydney, Australia, to Hobart, Tasmania, pits sailboats against the notoriously rough waters of Bass Strait and the Tasman Sea.
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Price: £8.99

The Shackleton Voyages: A Pictorial Anthology of the Polar Explorer and Edwardian Hero

Roland Huntford
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Ref: BKS000257

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Price: £12.99

Tamata and the Alliance

Bernard Moitessier (Transl. William Rodarmor)
Publisher: Seafarer Books

Ref: BKS000098

Bernard Moitessier left Vietrnam to answer the call of the sea, wandering the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic and the Caribbean as a sea-Gypsy, and surviving two catastrophic shipwrecks.
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Price: £19.95

At the Mercy of the Sea

John Kretschmer
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Ref: BKS000244

A “normal” Caribbean hurricane travels from east to west, but Lenny was anything but normal. Spawned south of Cuba in November 1999, this late-season storm defied all predictions by moving steadily east toward the Leeward Islands. Eventually building almost to Category 5 strength, Lenny squatted for two days between the Virgin Islands and St. Martin, whipping the ocean with 155 mile-per-hour winds and 60-foot seas.
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Price: £8.99

Type of Cover: Paperback (£10.56 Including VAT) Hardback (£18.79 Including VAT)