Books

I have a LOT of sailing books. Something like 5 large bookshelves full. Well, I guess it's drier than the real thing.

I can think of three major categories, with bunches of subcategories.

First are the real-life stories of sailing and cruising. One of the most famous is Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World. He was the first to perform that feat and has a great story to tell. There are a lots of others who came after him. Chichester (Gypsy Moth Circles the World) did it with only one stop. Robin Knox-Johnson was the first to do it without stopping, although his boat was almost falling apart around him. In the same race Moitessier (spelling?) might very well have won it, but he decided to drop out, sailing halfway around again to get back to Polynesia.

There are also others like Manry's Tinkerbelle, in which he tells of crossing the Atlantic in a 15 foot boat. Tania Aebi and Robin Lee Graham circled the world alone when they were very young. Other stories are more mundane but still interesting: families sailing in the Caribbean or across the Pacific and seeing new places and cultures from the unique perspective of a small boat. In a way, they "get it" better than those who race around without stopping, since they see the real point of seeing places (not just waves) and meeting people.

The second category are the non-fiction "how-to" books. There are many subcategories here: navigation, seamanship, marlinspike seamanship (knots, splices, etc.), voyage planning, electrical systems, sailmaking, and so on. I've been thinking about these and trying to decide which ones do and do not become obsolete. At first, I thought the marlinspike ones wouldn't "go bad" at all, but then I realized that we have very different materials for ropes now. They aren't spliced at all the same way as old manila ropes, for example. Navigation books have been profoundly affected by new technologies, especially GPS. And so it goes.

Finally, the third category is nautical fiction: stories about sailing, the sea, and related topics. It seems that the biggest subcategory here encompasses novels about the British navy in the golden age of sail (especially the wars with revolutionary France and Napoleon). These are led by Forester's Horatio Hornblower series and O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books. There are lots of others, too: Richard Kent, Dewey Lambdin, and others. Recently authors seem to be branching out into stories of the early American navy and others. And now there seems to be a trend toward contemporary stories about sailing and cruising, usually as mysteries.