For anyone who dreams of sailing away, here's an engrossing, gritty memoir of a 15,000-mile solo expedition in a tiny, hand-made boat. Bent on discovery, Ladd ranges from Montana to a harrowing sail along the pirate-ridden coast of Panama and Colombia, across the Andes, down a 600-mile river by night to avoid guerrillas, to the Antilles and the Caribbean. Robbed, capsized, arrested and befriended, he sails and rows through a tumult of uncharted adventures. The cast of characters: Dieter, mad ex-Nazi on a desert island; Hans, the smuggler who disappears at sea; castaways, prostitutes, and fortune seekers. Stow away with a poetic storyteller on a stormy, soulful voyage through nineteen countries, on the razor's edge between freedom and fear, loneliness and love.

Lawrence W. Cheek decided that he had to build a boat. Not just any boat, but a beautiful, wooden sailboat. "The Year of the Boat" is a memoir about what when on in that suburban garage -- a roiling process of measuring, cutting, gluing and sanding that was punctuated with supreme satisfaction, utter frustration, and plain bewilderment. From figuring out how to actually read a set of marine blueprints to learning the fine art of applying epoxy to getting the mast to stand up straight, this is a captivating adventure into the wilderness of DIY. The author touches on such topics as the invention of the retractable keel, the esteemed tradition of garage enterprises, the Platonic ideal sailboat, and more. It does not fully explain how to build a boat, but rather explores how one becomes unafraid of building a boat -- or undertaking any challenge.

In 1912 Noel Methley published his comprehensive and well informed book about the history and work of life-boats. It describes the circumstances under which life-boats were invented and the establishing of a global Live-Saving-Service, the construction and equipment of life-boats, their different owners and conveyers, and their special characteristics and their usage all over the world. The focus lies on the system of life-boats in Great Britain, but readers also gain a lot of information about the development of marine life-saving work in the USA, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Scandinavia Russia, France, Spain, Portugal, and in the British colonies. Reprint of the original edition with many illustrations.