Book Review

A Sailing Surfer’s Voyage of Awakening

By Captain Liz Clark

Sailors coached by Victor Kovalenko have won ten medals in eight Olympic Games, six of them gold. As John Bertrand (who skippered Australia II to victory in a certain regatta in the waters off Newport, RI in 1983) observes in the Foreword, Kovalenko is the most successful Olympic sailing coach the world has ever seen.

The 10th Annual Robie Pierce One-Design Regatta will be sailed June 1- 3, 2018 at Larchmont Yacht Club, and you’ll find no competitor in this wonderful event for sailors with disabilities with greater determination to win than Chris O’Brien of Trumbull, CT.

Chapters cover such topics as the advantages of multihulls, essential things to look for when shopping for a cruising cat, design, dynamics, and construction, hulls, appendages and rigs (with diagrams by the author), along with checklists for long range cruising and routine maintenance.

Every year, approximately 3,500 people drown in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control, drowning is the leading cause of accidental death in children under age 14, and it’s also one of the top causes of death for young men in their teens and twenties.

Based on a concept used to train Israeli Air Force pilots, the SeaWise Emergency Action Guide & Safety Checklist for Sailing Yachts has a tab-based flip book design that makes it easy to use for emergencies at sea that demand fast and effective responses.

Charting the Course for Your Life and Work

Long Island Sound, Fishers Island Sound, Block Island Sound and Narragansett Bay have some of the very best waters in the country for kayak touring, stand up paddling and kayak fishing, and our friend David Fasulo has written the definitive guide to exploring the many islands and coastal preserves of this scenic area.

Captain Joshua Slocum (1844-1909) was the first person to singlehandedly sail around the globe. Setting sail from Boston, MA in 1895 on a rebuilt 37-foot oyster sloop Spray, he returned to Newport, RI a little more than three years later, having logged 46,000 miles.

The 85-year-old Forsyth and Fiona have circumnavigated the globe twice, sailed around North America via the Northwest Passage and the Panama Canal, and completed voyages to the Baltic, the Arctic and Antarctic and many other places. An Inexplicable Attraction is a very entertaining compilation of these adventures.