Sailing to the Edge of Time – Book Review
Published by Adlard Coles, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
277 pages hardcover $28
A new book from John Kretschmer is always something to look forward to, and his latest, Sailing to the Edge of Time, may be his best yet. A gifted writer, photographer, sailor, philosopher and lecturer whose successful sail training business aboard his Kaufman 47 Quetzal utilizes a hands-on and uniquely philosophical approach to offshore sailing, John Kretschmer has completed twenty-six transatlantic and two transpacific passages. “When my sailing odometer clicked over 300,000,” he says, “I stopped counting.”
Packed with advice on seamanship learned over three decades of voyaging, along with a seabag full of humor), Sailing to the Edge of Time embraces the premises that living adventurously is living more fully, and that casting off the shackles of land is perhaps the finest way to make the most of one’s life. “This is the book I’ve been writing my entire life,” he says. “A memoir that is a mix of sea stories and sailing insights, it’s a deeply personal account of what it means to go to sea.”
Kretschmer is a longtime contributing editor at Sailing magazine, and hundreds of his articles have appeared in SAIL, Cruising World, Blue Water Sailing, Southern Boating, and Yachting Monthly. The author of six other books including Sailing a Serious Ocean, At the Mercy of the Sea, Cape Horn to Starboard, and Flirting With Mermaids, he lives in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
Autographed copies of Sailing to the Edge of Time are available through one of the finest sailing sites on the web, John Kretschmer Sailing, where you can also sign up for John’s offshore passages and workshops. The first passage of 2019, 3,000 nautical miles from Cape Verde to Guadeloupe, is sold out, but as of this writing there were two berths left on each of his Trans Caribe voyages (800 nm from St. Martin to the Grenadines and back; March 9 – 18 and April 20 – 29. To learn more, log onto yayablues.com.
