Extreme Sailing Across Troubled Waters

SEA CHANGE: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat by Peter Nichols (Viking, $23.95).

When he leaves the coast of England, Peter Nichols’ marriage has broken up. By the time he reaches the shore of America, his sailboat has broken down and he’s lost that too. He is left with almost nothing except an old ambition to write something wonderful.

With this heartbreaking and harrowing sea tale, Nichols has.

Traveling across an ocean in a small sailboat remains, as it has for centuries, one of humankind’s most elemental journeys. Doing it single-handed in a boat with no engine carries the endeavor to extremes.

Nichols proceeds less from adventure than necessity. Living hand to mouth, he is unable to sell the 27-foot coastal cruiser, Toad, he shared for five years with his estranged wife, who has gone ashore to stay. So he prepares to bring the boat across the Atlantic.

En route, he reflects alternately on the romance and terrors of offshore sailing, enriching his account with lore from those who preceded him over the blue horizons. Then, sifting through the goods he and his wife had accumulated aboard, he blunders on her old journals: her account of their rocky and poignant life together, revelations both wondrous and disturbing to a lonely man at sea.

Deep out into the belly of the Atlantic, the protective skin of Toad begins to delaminate. Eventually, she is shipping water between her planks faster than Nichols can pump it out. With equal measures of resignation and alarm, he sounds a mayday over his radio.

He is lucky he is rescued. And so are we, fellow sailors, travelers and armchair adventurers.

BLUE MERIDIAN: The Search for the Great White Shark by Peter Matthiessen (Penguin, $12.95, paperback).

In the 26 years since this adventure tale was first published, nature documentaries and Hollywood have numbed our sense of wonder. Today, we casually expect the astonishing, and when it comes to sharks we demand it--fast and furious.

By such standards, this reissue of Peter Matthiessen’s account of the making of one such pioneering documentary is showing its age. What was then so exciting--observing great whites in action in remote oceans--now seems regrettably ordinary.

Matthiessen’s uncritical reportage of chumming water with horse meat to bring on sharks and a feeding frenzy--a crude circus strictly for the benefit of the camera--is beneath what we have come to expect in the years since from one of our most commanding nature writers.

TO TIMBUKTU: A Journey Down the Niger by Mark Jenkins (Morrow, $25, photographs).

Beginning back with British explorers Richard Burton, Henry Stanley and all the others, white travelers into remote Africa barely seem to penetrate the soul of the place. Burton et al at least had the excuse that other white people had never seen such landscapes or people. Magazine journalist Mark Jenkins has no such excuse as he hurries across the surface film of one of Africa’s most surprising and culturally rich nations, Mali.

Traveling from the upper reaches of the Niger River downstream to the sandy and overly romanticized outpost of Timbuktu, Jenkins is plenty evocative about the discomfort of travel here, but lacks the curiosity, or time or stomach, to go much deeper.

Quick trips:

MAINE: Compass American Guides, Second Edition by Charles C. Calhoun (Fodor’s, $18.95, maps, illustrations). This is my first encounter with the Compass American Guides, and I’m a convert. This is a loving, erudite and uncommonly well illustrated guidebook that provides, in addition to standard information, the insight of art, literature and Maine culture. I felt like I was holding a personal invitation to visit.

AMERICAN WALKS IN LONDON: Ten Step-by-Step Itineraries for North American Visitors by Richard Tames (Interlink, $14.95, maps, illustrations). So you’ve seen the standard tourist London. Now, in this quirky, fun book are some walks to connect the city to notable Americans. Where did Edward R. Murrow broadcast live during the Blitz? Where did Mark Twain drink beer? Where did F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald stay? From which pulpit did the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preach?

Books to Go appears the second and fourth week of every month.