Admirals' Angle » Books

#44 – An Admiral’s Reference Shelf

Gwen Hamlin — Sat, 01 May 2010 03:03:00 +0000

For the aspiring Admiral – that is the cruising woman who wants to be as informed and involved as possible in her cruising experience – the onboard reference shelf is an ideal resource.

Every cruising boat out there has one: at minimum a volume of general seamanship and the manual for the boat’s engine, at maximum a mini library.

The ability to reach for a relevant reference to answer a particular question at hand is helpful, but there’s no reason we can’t, at our leisure, read the whole book to expand our overall knowledge base.

How important do these references become? Marcie of Nine of Cups, who sailed this year from Chile to New Zealand, puts it well. “When we started our cruising life, we had precious little experience. We did, however, have a number of very experienced “friends” to rely on.

These good friends – the Dashews, Pardeys, Calders and Cornells, to mention a few – helped us out of more than a few ticklish situations. In reality we’ve never met them, but we’ve read their books cover to cover and hardly a day goes by we don’t refer to at least one of them!”

Based on input from my Admirals, here’s how a typical cruiser’s library today sorts itself out. In some categories, you may just have one title; in others you may have dozens!

General seamanship

The most popular general seamanship books among the Admirals are either Chapman Piloting & Seamanship or The Annapolis Book of Seamanship. These big books give you the fundamentals – from the correct terminology of the parts of the boat to the basics of boat handling and sail trim, navigation, understanding weather, handling lines and sails, engine mechanics, and even overviews of today’s modern equipment. Frequently used as texts in boating education, these books are perfect for filling in the blanks. Also, be sure you have a copy of the International Rules of the Road.

Voyaging handbooks

Several of the big names in cruising have produced voyaging handbooks that many of the Admirals rely on. The crews of Nine of Cups and Ursa Minor recommend Nigel Calder’s Cruising Handbook. “It’s a great reference book covering everything from selecting the right boat to detailed descriptions of most of the systems aboard a modern cruising boat.”

Marcie also recommends Steve and Linda Dashew’s Offshore Cruising Encyclopedia, “a compendium of information on boats and how to live aboard.” Jane of Lionheart relied on Beth Leonard’s The Voyager’s Handbook. “For the newbie I was, it gave a good base to build my own reference material and to think about all the things I needed to prepare myself for, like my home canning. Well worth it, and fun, too!”

Guides to weather analysis

Weather is a tricky category because, of course, it depends on where you cruise. Basics are introduced in general seamanship books, but, for more details, recommendations are Weather Predicting Simplified by Michael Carr or Meteorology Today by C. Donald Ahrens. Crossing into the South Pacific? It’s worth ordering a copy of New Zealand weatherman Bob McDavitt’s Mariners Met Pack before you set out.

Storm management

The classic book for storm management is Adlard Coles’ Heavy Weather Sailing. Largely based on the experiences of high latitude ocean, this was one of the most discomfiting books I ever read!

Much more reassuring and relevant for today’s typical cruiser is Lin and Larry Pardey’s Storm Tactics Handbook.

Maintenance references for the boat

For boat maintenance the one most revered bible is Nigel Calder’s Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual. Nearly every Admiral listed it. Calder has a knack for explaining things coupled with a rigorously thorough mind. His stand-alone books on refrigeration and diesel engines are very accessible as well.

For the rig, Marcie recommends Sail and Rig Tuning by Ivar Dedekam as “a short and concise book that does exactly what it says.”

Equipment manuals

Of course, the most important materials for your boat’s maintenance will be a well-organized, accessible collection of manuals for every piece of equipment onboard. We kept ours in notebooks by category with pocket pages to hold smaller manuals. For some equipment (e.g. engines, outboard motors) you may want to purchase detailed shop manuals.

Catalogs for ordering parts

Right next to all the manuals, most cruisers also carry catalogues from the major marine suppliers, including a Sailrite catalogue for sail and canvas supplies. It greatly simplifies the ordering of parts to be shipped in.

Marlinspike seamanship

You can get the basics of everyday marlinspike seamanship from general seamanship books, but books specializing in all the knots, splices, hitches and rope work we sailors use as well as the energy-saving mysteries of blocks and tackles are very handy to have. Marcie’s thorough list includes Ashley Book of Knots by Clifford Ashley, The Marlinspike Sailor by Hervey Garret Smith, and The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice by Brion Toss. You might even turn decorative ropework into a hobby!

Guide books

Guidebooks of several types help us plan our trips. Jimmy Cornell’s World Cruising Routes and World Cruising Handbook are where most planning starts. Next are wide-area overviews such as Pacific Crossing Guide. Detail you won’t want to be without comes in individual island cruising guides. Some areas like the Virgin Islands will have more than one, each with a different angle. If you stay long enough you might want them all! For land touring most of the Admirals choose Lonely Planet guides, which Kathy of Hale Kai says you can download from the Internet by chapter. In addition to travel info, LP Guides distill a lot of history for every stop,and list recommended reading in local history and literature.

Nature guides for reef fish, birds, marine animals, shells, trees, flowers, the night sky, geology, oceanography!

Because we become so immersed in the natural world, we find ourselves wanting resources to learn more about it. Some references are easy to find as you go, but others are scarce or expensive. If you are snorkeling or diving in the Caribbean, for example, don’t leave without Paul Humann’s Reef Fish, Reef Creature and Reef Coral. He also has books for other ecosystems like Baja, Galapagos and the tropical Pacific.

Fishing guides (not to be confused with fish ID books!)

Today’s cruising fisherman’s bible is Scott and Wendy Bannerot’s The Cruiser’s Handbook of Fishing, best supplemented by plastic fish ID cards (so you can decide quickly if it’s a fish you want to keep!)

Medical references

Mary of Camryka, who spends all her time in remote Panama recommends The Merck Manual and Where There Is No Doctor. Marcie adds The Onboard Medical Guide by Paul Gill, MD.

General references

A current atlas and a flag ID book satisfy a lot of curiosity about unfamiliar ensigns, Hoyle’s Rules of Games satisfies a lot of disputes, and an English dictionary is essential for Scrabble players! I personally like to have an encyclopedia, but it’s the one reference I opt for digital.

Which raises the big question as the waterline sinks: must these be virtual books or will digital do? Until the Internet beams to every anchorage from the sky, I don’t think we cruisers will want to be without our references onboard.

Cruisers are adapting, and, as use of the Kindle expands among cruisers, waterlines may rise. But consider that many of the above are references you’ll either want to check quickly and repeatedly or peruse slowly in the cockpit. I’m a book person, so my prejudice is clear. But the minds of upcoming generations may work differently.

(For a complete list of Admiral recommended references (including cookbooks!) as well as a comprehensive list of online resources, please see www.womenandcruising.com)

This article was published in the March 2010 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

#43 – Bookshelf – Part Two: Cruising Sagas

Gwen Hamlin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:54:53 +0000

Cruising literature as a genre started with Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World published in 1899. Many who read it were motivated to reach for their own adventure, and many of those who succeeded also wrote up their experiences. More new sailors were inspired to leave the dock and more stories were subsequently chronicled. Now, over a century later, the cruising memoir tradition is alive and flourishing, exploding onto the Internet with myriad websites and blogs.

While Sailing Alone Around the World is a classic and Slocum’s adventures the inspiration for many sailors to take off and circumnavigate, I would have been equally interested to read the experiences and viewpoints his first wife Virginia who sailed the world at his side during thirteen years he was a commercial ship’s captain. By accounts, Ginny was a perfect partner for Slocum and took to their shared life at sea despite several misadventures and despite bearing and raising all their children on board. Wouldn’t Ginny’s perspective be a wonderful one to share? She sounds like an Admiral to me!

Since I have been writing this column, I have been looking for and collecting books about women cruising, and, of course, I’ve asked the Admirals for input. Because really, does a woman considering setting off on a voyage want to read adventure sagas of big storms, long passages, lee shores or shipwrecks that make up so many of cruising literature’s classics?

“The first book my future husband lent me to read about cruising was The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier,” remembers Debbie of Illusions. While many sailors consider Moitessier one of the great singlehanders of all times, Debbie read the book, took it back to her future cruising partner and said, “Anyone would have to be crazy to want to do what this man did!”

Most of the really good books I’ve found about women and cruising were written in the past ten to twenty years. Of course, in part that’s due to recent books being easier to find, but they also relate more directly to our current experience than many of the classics.

One of the most popular of these is Ann Vanderhoof’s An Embarrassment of Mangoes: A Caribbean Interlude. This is the lovely account of a Canadian couple’s decision to take a break from high pressure jobs and Toronto’s urban cold and sail south to the warmth of the Caribbean for a few years. Like most couples the idea comes easily, but the realities of preparing to go and actually getting underway nearly overwhelm the endeavor. As they persevere, the book blooms with wonderful descriptions of the Caribbean and, as Mary of I Wanda points out, “yummy recipes for using that readily-available but Strange-to-a-North-American produce that we all encounter down island.”

Some other excellent W&C books are Suzanne Geisemann’s Living A Dream, in which Suzanne, a former aide to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (on 9/11!) juggles her mixed feelings about the cruising dream with her husband versus the call of a high-powered career.

Another is Gillian Outerbridge’s Going About! A Waterway Adventure. After a traumatic experience, Outerbridge, at 60, finally undertakes her dream of a solo voyage, one she makes over the course of two years through the waterways and canals of New York State and Canada in her 20’ Flicka. Dreams don’t have to be global.

On the other hand, in Pat Henry’s By the Grace of the Sea : A Woman’s Solo Odyssey Around the World, the author struggles to get on her feet personally and financially after betrayal and bankruptcy by sailing alone around the world. The going gets heavy at times, but her salvation comes through her painting which grows from the seed of architectural sketches into an art that supports her through ups and downs right round the world.

I also very much like Margo Wood’s (of Charlie’s Chart’s fame) homely story in A Prairie Chicken Goes To Sea of her transformation from a Canadian farm girl into a competent mariner. “Imagine my amazement when I found this book on board after my husband died,” says Debbie. “The fact that she kept her boat and kept cruising after her husband died told me that I COULD continue on if I wanted to badly enough.”

Themes of self-doubt, second thoughts, and anxieties weave their way through many of the cruising books by women for women. Unlike our men, we’re less inclined to just put on a bold face and soldier through. We also make a lot of our own anxieties, stirring them up like a bubbling cauldron.

Janna Cawrse Esarey does a wonderful job of capturing this knack for angst of which we females are capable (to distract ourselves from other anxieties?) in her recent The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers, and a Woman’s Search for the Meaning of Wife. On their ambitious honeymoon – a two year cruise across the Pacific in the 35’ Dragonfly – Janna (who joins us now as an Admiral) finds the “passage from first date to first mate anything but smooth.” I really loved her irreverent look at emotions we all feel in some measure!

Several Admirals cite Tania Aebi’s now classic Maiden Voyage – her story of circumnavigating as a teenager with relatively little knowledge – as early inspiration in the “if-she-could-do-it-then-I-can” department. Karyn of Magic Carpet similarly recommends The Reluctant Mariner by Joanna Hackett, “a humorous and insightful account” of a woman on a circumnavigation carried “well outside her comfort zone.”

Karyn also recommends First Lady: A history-making solo voyage around the world, an account by Australian Kay Cottee of her record-breaking non-stop circumnavigation in 1988, and Elizabeth Thurston’s Dolphins At Sunset, “a woman’s perspective of cruising with a family and maintaining her self-esteem.”

Several valuable volumes that also come recommended which are not so much cruising memoirs but books specifically aimed at cruising women are:

Debra Ann Cantrell’s Changing Course : A Woman’s Guide to Choosing the Cruising Life,
Diana Jessie’s The Cruising Woman’s Advisor ,
and Suzanne Giesemann’s It’s Your Boat Too: A Woman’s Guide to Greater Enjoyment on the Water.

Cantrell’s book is the result of a five-year study interviewing over 100 cruising women in an effort to understand the process through which woman adjust to following their partners to sea!

Jessie’s “Advisor”, much like the Admiral’s Angle, consults with over thirty contemporaries for perspectives on topics of interest to cruising women, while Giesemann’s second book, It’s Your Boat Too, is a manual specifically designed to “help women embrace the idea of being as knowledgeable as the captain.”

Must you read all these books before dropping a dockline? Not at all.

In fact, like me most of my Admirals picked up their cruising lit – including any of the big names in blue-water sailing – like Hiscock, Roth, Pardey, Dashew, etc.– after they were underway.

It’s important to remember that each of these cruising sagas (including all the web accounts you find on the Internet) are just one person or one couple’s experience and not a master plan for a “right way.” You take from them just what will aid you.

Ellen of Cayenne III observes that when she did happen to read some of those “authorities” after she’d been cruising awhile, she thought it was just as well she hadn’t read them before, because she might never have left! “My ignorance allowed me to develop my own cruising style – and now, I’m among the few cruisers we met in 1998 who are still aboard.”

Indeed, more than any volume of cruising literature, the books the Admirals felt most strongly about were their favorite references, the ones they take aboard and consult regularly, volumes you might think were more the province of the captain. So next month, in the last part of this topic, we’ll look at “An Admirals’ Reference Shelf.”

(Note: On www.womenandcruising.com we are launching a new page about the Cruising Woman’s Bookshelf. Send us your booklist recommendations.)

This article was published in the February 2010 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

#42 – My Bookshelf, A Mental Voyage – Part One

Gwen Hamlin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:15:47 +0000

For many cruisers, reading is a major pastime, and the time to read is one of the great gifts of cruising. When Don and I did our big refit in Trinidad in ’99 we added 480 inches of teak shelving, tucked in from stem to stern. It’s the one thing boat designers totally forget about cruising, the amount of books we want to have on board.

Even with all the added shelving, I had to learn I couldn’t keep every book I read. Instead, beginning in ’01, Don and I each kept an Excel spreadsheet booklist. Since then a quick check reveals I have read 414 books and Don has read 283. (Our reading rate slows notably during time we spend back in the US!)

Those totals do not include reference books, manuals, cruising guides or Lonely Planets, and do include more mysteries, romances, and just plain junk than I would like to admit. But that’s the nature of cruisers’ reading; you read what you can swap for, and, for most entries, it was not any big deal to stamp them with our rubber “From the Library of Tackless II” stamp, scribble in the date and port, and leave them on a marina swap shelf.

But there are always books that, for one reason or another, have a major impact on you, books that you strive to keep no matter what. As a writer and a reader I have always thought of those books as experiences in themselves, and with the time cruising gave me to read, I found myself choosing more mentally-challenging reading. Our new bookshelves quickly became packed tight with books that were interwoven with my experience of our voyage.

Early on, Don and I both were mostly addicted to nautical fiction, mostly the popular series by Patrick O’Brien (Jack Aubrey / Steven Maturin Novels), C. S Forester (Horatio Hornblower) and Alexander Kent (Richard Bolitho), all fictional heroes of the British navy in the 1700s-1800s. Their adventures were entertaining, of course, as we ourselves swashed through the islands, but they also painted a backdrop of seafaring’s historical role throughout the places we were visiting.

We also worked our way through other sea-going classics like:
- Mutiny on the Bounty,
- The Voyage of the Beagle,
- and Two Years Before the Mast,
- even Homer’s Odyssey
- plus some more recent works like Eric Newby’s The Last Grain Race,
- Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex;
- or Farley Mowatt’s The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float.

If I could pinpoint one book that changed the course of my subsequent reading it would be (perhaps oddly!) The River Congo, by Peter Forbath. At the time, we were traveling through Panama’s San Blas Islands with Bob and Kathy of the Tayana 37 Briana. Obviously we weren’t going anywhere near the Belgian Congo, but Bob had been born and raised there, and he lent us the book. This book brought uncomfortably alive the history of Belgium’s impact on the Congo, a history happening in the same period as so many great European seafaring explorations, and, in fact, a direct outgrowth of it.

Until that book I’d had little interest in history except as a backdrop for a good novel. And though I’d thought myself a worldly person, I was forced to realize how little I actually understood of what historical forces had steered all the stuff going on in the world.

A perfect next step was Daniel Boorstein’s excellent and panoramic The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know his World and Himself. In a preamble, Boorstein says his hero is “Man the Discoverer” and in the book he examines all the horizons that mankind has had to aim at, not just physical ones, but conceptual ones, each of which “had to be opened for us by countless Columbuses” (including a huge section on Chinese exploration!) It made me keen to be my own Columbus, but also to be a careful and considering one.

From then on the books that earned permanent positions on my shelf were those that expanded my understanding of this world. Some were quite specific, like David McCaulay’s The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914, which carried me through the Panama Canal and northward through Central America, or William Beebe’s 1926 book The Arcturus Adventure recounting his New York Zoological Society expedition by ship to the Galapagos and Cocos Islands which partnered our own trip there.

In Mexico, someone gave me a copy of Travelers’ Tales Mexico, a collection of travel writing about the country. This introduced me to the genre of travel writing and the whole list of Traveler’s Tales titles, numbers of which I ordered and devoured including collections of travel writing about particular places like Australia and Thailand, about food (The Adventure of Food was an early favorite), and several women’s travel collections. These books began to influence the way I wrote my own Blog.

The travel collections led me onward to books by the contributors like Bill Bryson, Tim Cahill, and Paul Theroux as well as authors whose work, fiction or non-fiction, is deeply immersed in place. My interests ranged from places I was actually visiting (a reread of Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez while in Baja California seemed appropriate), to places I was far from, like Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (Chile), and Jorge Varga Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (Dominican Republic.) A shopping bag of English-language books from Southeast Asia acquired in La Paz sent my mind roving for months through Myanmar, Indonesia, India and Afghanistan, places I’d never otherwise reach. I particularly enjoyed Simon Winchester’s non-fiction Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, even though it, too, was unsettling and foreshadowed the Indonesian tsunami.

Cruising in the Pacific, my reading shifted nearer to hand:
- Tony Horowitz’s Blue Latitudes (following Captain Cook’s voyages);
- Gavin Young’s Slow Boats Home (in which he travels by tramp steamer east across the Pacific from Asia);
- Thor Heyerdah’s Fatu-Hiva ,
- Melville’s Typee (Marquesas),
- Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpense (Tahiti);
- Jennifer Vanderbe’s Easter Island
- and Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific.

In Tonga I found William Mariner’s An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands; In the South Pacific Ocean, his true account as a boy of surviving a massacre of his ship to be “adopted” by the local cannibals, and in Fiji I plunged into R.A Derrick’s eye-opening A history of Fiji plus Paul Theroux’s somewhat jaundiced The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific in which he and his kayak work their way east from Australia.

Last year one book really jumped out from the others as reading pertinent to cruising: Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. I was reading it as we sailed through tribal Vanuatu. It presents a persuasive analysis of the differences in development by the many different cultures of the world all based on the logical platform of what their bit of earth historically offered them in fundamental resources like domesticable animals or grains. Guns, Germs and Steel was definitely one of those “ah-hah!” books for me.

Of course, these are just some of the books that made up the mental voyage that partnered my physical voyage, both of which, of course, are uniquely mine. Few of the books had any direct impact our on our sailing, but neither did the murder mysteries or the romances! Not one of them is a contemporary sailing book, the kind people typically read to prepare for cruising. Truthfully, I didn’t discover such books until I starting coming back to the States and going to boat shows…about the time I became involved with Women and Cruising and started this column!

When I did, I had to start a whole new shelf! (To be continued next month.)