★★☆☆☆ | Sailing & Seamanship | Print | Own | StoryGraph | GoodreadsÂ
I thought I was getting a modern-day account of a shipwreck at sea. But instead, the author rehashes a fairly well-known account from the 1960s of a couple enduring the sinking of their sailboat after colliding with a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
The book focuses on the marriage between this English couple as they struggled to survive at sea and later under the pressure of media interest in their story. The husband is an introverted pessimist with asshole tendencies. The wife believes things happen for a reason and everything will work out if only they keep a positive attitude.
It is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive as the absence of surrender.
Elmhirst circles back so often to this idea that the couple’s ultimate survival hinged on a positive attitude, that I guess that’s the main point of the book. I’m sorry, but these sailors made so many errors in seamanship that it’s shocking they survived at all. The author admits in the afterward that she’s never stepped foot on a sailboat. She doesn’t know port from starboard, stem from stern. Who writes a survival at sea story without having sailed?
I am clearly not the target audience for this one.