The Annotated Sailing Alone Around the World

Many boaters have favorite books stashed on board, books about the sea and cruising and maritime adventures and the like. We have tucked in our salon book shelf such titles as Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau; Alan Moorehead's Darwin and the Beagle (fitting, as last Thursday was the bicentennial of his birth);  Kathrene Pinkerton's Three's a Crew; Louis Rubin Jr.'s Small Craft Advisory; Farley Mowat's The Boat Who Wouldn't Float; First You Have To Row A Little Boat by Richard Bode; Fishing With John by Edith Iglauer; Denton Moore's Gentlemen Never Sail To Weather; The Twilight Seas by Sally Carrighar; Muriel Wylie Blanchet's great classic The Curve Of Time. And many, many more - - it's a really big book shelf, and June (my prolific reading wife and companion) no doubt will point out some of her favorites that I've overlooked.

Soon to join this collection of maritime dreams, fantasies, adventures, and lores will be an old classic now revisited. Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World: The first solo voyage around the world. Next month will see the release of The Annotated Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum annotated by teacher/journalist Rod Scher. (Pre-orders are being accepted by Amazon.com). This edition provides explanation, commentary, clarification, and "In the News" sidebars for historical context that will make Slocum's masterpiece more accessible to today's readers, sailors and landlubbers alike.

Joshua Slocum's story was the stuff of well honed seamanship and amazing skill, far away dreams, and bold adventure. Nova Scotia born, a master mariner by his mid-twenties, on April 24, 1895, and at the age of 51 Captain Slocum left on his legendary 42,000-mile adventure to circumnavigate the world in his 37-foot sloop "Spray". Thirty-seven months later he returned, the first person to sail around the world alone. His published the story of his account in 1900. In 1909 he set out on another lone voyage, to South America, never to be heard from again.

Some review of Slocum's book.

"A classic book. . . . Slocum's writing is as elegant as his thirty-seven-foot sloop, SPRAY, whose crossing of the Atlantic he describes vividly." --New Yorker

"A literate and absorbing yarn published in 1900 and still in print. . . [Slocum's] story is a convincing tale of the intelligence, skill and fortitude that drove a master navigator." --New York Times

"As a writer Slocum is given to plain understatement, dry wit, wry humor and Yankee observations about nature that led some to call him a sea-locked Thoreau. . . . He offers descriptive glances at the sea, in storm or calm, that can rival those of Joseph Conrad." --Smithsonian

Rod Scher, a longtime boating enthusiast, former software developer and a recovering English teacher, is currently VP of Technology for Class.com, where he spends much of his time developing educational software while plotting ways to get back out on the water. In the interests of full disclosure, Rod is also my son-in-law. He, Lesley and Annie, their shepherd-retriever mix, live in Lincoln, Nebraska.

This is a "must" book for your shelf, after you've read it, of course.

To order any of the books cited above, and especially The Annotated Sailing Alone, simply click on the title.