Customer Reviews

At One with the Sea: Alone Around the World

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This young Lass from NZ finds her "course" in life with a little help from some UK friends (incl. 53 feet of boat) and sets off to circumnavigate the globe. She was the first woman to do it (and female around the Horn alone) and that is maybe a much greater feat than by first man. Why you ask? Well, this circumnavigator was learning EVERYTHING on the go... Very little previous experience. Reading the book also brings back that only a "few years ago" sailers must cope with sextant, "dead reckoning" and radio. No satelite allerted helicopter rescue or 24 hour pin-point GPS navigation. Naomi was not only the first female long-distance hero, but maybe she was the last of the real "Classic Navigators". What makes her book special is that severe lack of experience and her disarming honesty about everything. When reading her account you also learn as you go and soon you can't help feeling as if you too are the lone sailor onboard "Express Crusader" bravely forging ahead. One of the most memorable books in this field I think. Recommended!

That this young woman, 28 at the time and newlywed in 1978, sailed around the world alone with relatively scant previous sailing experience rates right up there with the first person, whoever it was, who scaled Mt. Everest. The sheer physical exertion alone that she endured is mind-boggling. The book is short, 185 pages in paperback, but she conveys very well the grueling journey and her emotional ups and downs. There are lots of quotes directly from her well-written logbook. Much of the time she was physically exhausted from lack of sleep. Nine months on the often-pounding water (especially near Antarctica) with just two brief interludes of a few days each (Cape Town and the Falklands) for boat repairs. You finish this book just stunned at this individual who was born in New Zealand to what appears to have been a relatively normal family.

She was later made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Sounds snazzy, and she deserved it. I wonder what she's done since, what her post-journey life became. She is an inspiration. (Update: I was saddened to read that about five years after her heroic journey, her husband drowned in a boating accident while she was pregnant with their first child. Numerous times in her book, she refers to her solitary and private nature. This would explain the lack of information on the internet about Dame Naomi James who would be around 60 years old at this writing in 2010. She earned a Ph.D. in philosophy around 2006, I learned, and apparently now lives in Ireland. I wish her well.)