Customer Reviews

Keeping Australia on the Left: A Catamaran Odyssey Around Australia

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Anyone who has ever sailed, or dreamt of a sailing adventure, has no choice but to read this book. Mark Darby has completed an awesome task, tantamount to a dare, by sailing a small boat through some large seas around a huge continent! His adventures have been well crafted with vivid word pictures and a descriptive action style which put me in the boat with him and Sue. I can still clearly see the beautiful Australian coastline, the memorable people they met and the first reading has left me with a sweet salt water taste in my mouth and wanting more.

This is, I believe, a unique sea saga which would encourage any would be adventurer, with personal challenges and emotions spilling out onto every page. Nine out of 10!

The most appealing thing about this book is the journey Mark made - I have always wondered what it would be like to circumnavigate Australia. I also felt I learned alot about Australia from his description of the different regions. The journey itself was fine but not a life or death adventure. It's a good story.

This is a nice book about a great journey around Australia. Mark and Sue set out in 1986 on a 16' catamaran which basically consisted of two double sea kayaks rigged together. One motivation of this trip was to visit the America's cup races in Perth in 1987. Taking this rather small craft around Australia within two years is a tremendous achievement, even though they hitched a couple of rides along the way when their schedule gets tight or their boat needs repair. The book is well written and has a couple of color pictures inside that make the adventure come to life. I wished Mark had spent more of the twelve or so years between the trip and the publication of this book with an editor, because there are lots of typos and some paragraphs are in here twice. What I found particularly odd, is that there is hardly any of Sue in this book - not a single picture of her, no romance, no fighting, no other point of view. This point is pretty much completely omitted by Mark, and that even though (or maybe because?) they married later on (and then divorced even later on). I found that weird, but I did not regret buying it, because it is very inspiring to read about what some people dare to do with very small boats...