Customer Reviews

A Speck on the Sea

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you sail in a small boat or paddle a kayak you MUST read this fascinating book. Although it is about the history of small boat voyaging there is a ton of practical information for small boaters that will make them better, safer, sailors. I've read through this book several times and each time I learn more that I can apply to my own sailing skills. I have read many maritime travelogues before and thought I knew most of the great small boat skippers, but I was surprised at how many voyagers I hadn't heard about before and how detailed the author was in his research about even the ones I thought I knew. This is a fun book that reads quickly, but leaves you wanting more. The voyages described are told with expertise, humor, and in such a way that one story leads into the next. You find yourself turning the pages to find out 'what happened next'. I liked the story about the Latvian sailor who sailed from Sydney to Los Angeles during the Depression using a homemade sextant he built out of old hacksaw blades. His boat had a leak in it when he started but somehow he managed to cross the Pacific Ocean in it anyway. I also like how the author corrected some long standing misconceptions about some famous sailors like John Voss, Franz Romer, and Robert Manry. I heartily recommend this book to new or old sailors.

A great collection of tales of amazing small boat adventures and adventurers. I bought this book thinking I would be able to read a story at a time ad set the book aside inbetween - but it was too good to set aside. From way back in history and white slave escapes - to modern record setters. This book constantly made my jaw drop in awe and amazement.

Okay, so there are no stories of trans-oceanic voyages on soap bars in this book; just needed a catchy rhyme for the title. But this fascinating seaman's yarn covers just about every other buoyant contrivance that went to sea, at least those twenty feet long or less. This limitation is my only slight quibble about the book. Although in the beginning some boats are covered which exceed the twenty-foot benchmark established by the author, it does seem a bit arbitrary. Why not include Josh Slocum's marvelous circumnavigation in a 37-footer that was
already a century old when he obtained her? It should be noted that solo circumnavigations are covered by the 1974 book by Tod Holms (unfortunately long out of print and hard to obtain). That said, Longyard has provided a delightful compendium of
seamanship in Lillipution craft. Many might be written off as
publicity stunts and gimmicks, which they were. None could be duplicated by anyone other than the most intrepid and hardy sailor. Even then, the voyager turned up half dead, if he survived at all.

This is not a dry technical manual on small boat seamanship, although there are a lot of nuggets for the sailor in the tales. Human interest predominates. There are tales of cruelty and chicanery as in the story of Voss's seagoing canoe, and those invoking great sympathy as in how Andrews enticed an advernturesome young New Jersey farm girl to join him in a transatlantic stunt which ended in the disappearance of both somewhere beneath the tempestuous waves. All in all, brisk and
delightful reading cover to cover.

What a great collection of true adventures occurring in small boats! Not only is this book extremely well researched, but it is also entertaining and inspirational. A Speck on the Sea chronicals the history of small boat sailing - and rowing and rafting and a few more bizarre methods of transportation - over the past several hundred years. The voyages described are various: phenomenal or silly; intentional or accidental; successful or tragic. But all are fascinating tales that make one realize the capacity of humans to overcome odds (or not, as the case may be). My personal favorite stories include William Okeley's secret escape from Algerian slavery in a folding rowboat, Poon Lim's 133-day escape from a sunken ship in a life raft, and Robert Manry's escape from Ohioan suburbia by crossing the Atlantic in a small sailboat. My compliments to Mr. Longyard for, although I am not a sailor myself, these stories have all but convinced me to attempt a small-boat ocean crossing myself. This is a book to treasure.

I got this book as a birthday present. Thanks, Honey! It was on my wish list. I'm a small boat sailor, it looked interesting.

So, I've read it, and thought about it a bit, and read parts again, and listed below is what I think. Before I tell you what I think, though, I should confess that I'm a multihull sailor. I like small multihulls, I built one, I sail it, little multis are my sort of boat. So, I'm not pretending to lack any bias here, I like what I like.

Mr. Longyard likes what he likes, too, and it's his book, so he gets to write about it. What he likes is small boats going a long way, "small" apparently meaning "short waterline", and apparently the shorter the better. I'm not sure about that. I'll come back to it.

So, the book starts with some history, has a good bit on the Rob Roy and McGregor, a good bit on Fenger and Yakaboo, and in general is very enjoyable when it deals with this sort of kayak like boat. I suppose my interests and his intersect there; the boats are monohulls, so he thinks they're ok, and they sail well, so I like them.

He also gives a short history of the West Wight Potter, which was nice, since I always wondered who thought that was a good idea. Apparently an early model was being delivered by sea, was unable to claw off a lee shore, was washed up on shore, then trucked around the difficult bit and finished the trip. This rather mixed achievement was enough to launch the model to success, somehow. The cheery tone taken in this section, which was when stripped of the superlatives about a boat that was well out of its comfort zone and ended wrecked on the beach, was a little surprising to me.

Later, in a section on the rather stupid "shortest "sailboat" to cross the Atlantic" record, the cheery and admiring tone continues. It's pretty clear that these little four and five foot waterline boats can't sail to windward to any effect, but apparently that's ok. At one point two of the four foot something 'boats' are described as "windbound" and unable to launch; unusual word, that. "Windbound". Sort of a passive voice way of saying they had a headwind and they couldn't sail to windward, which I guess gets to be a serious problem in these things.

Both of these sections bugged me. Treating dangerous, bad boats as cute or stubborn or something else complementary only encourages people to try them. And it's not like Mr. Longyard can't be critical, or even scathing; the section on California artist Bas Jan Ader, who was lost at sea in a Guppy 13, left me in little doubt what Mr. Longyard thought of that attempt, or of Mr. Ader's artwork. But apparently it's a good idea to try to cross the Atlantic in a four foot boat. Ok.

Multihulls are almost completely ignored. A Prindle sailing through the Caribbean gets about a paragraph, the British Newman brothers who sailed an outrigger called "The Spirit of Cleveland" across the Atlantic get a page; I'd love to know more about that boat. In both cases capsize was mentioned as a terrible menace, which perhaps shows some of the author's feelings on the subject. Francis Brenton's story is apparently too good to leave out. His boat (two canoes lashed together) is briefly admitted to being a catamaran, but is thereafter called a 'raft' or a 'dugout canoe'.

Wharram crossing oceans in a 23' cat for the first time in the '50s gets not a line. Nothing on Nicol, nothing on Piver, nothing on Brown. Nothing on that more recent guy with the nomad lifestyle thing and the Microship trimaran, nothing on that other guy who sailed a Tiki 21 all over the place and back down under. Nothing about any of the guys who have sailed the Fulmar tris all over, or Ida Little and Michael Walsh who sailed a beachcat all over the Caribbean, or any of the people who have tried or managed to sail a small cat across the Atlantic. This really does bug me; the book gives unstinting praise to oddball boats which are frankly bad sailors, and to dangerous record chasers in things that are barely sailboats at all, and ignores real sailboats making real passages. A 'sailboat' of under four feet LOA gets pages of fulsome praise, and Wharram sailing from England across oceans with two young girls as crew and starting a revolution is left out. What are we doing here?

Oh well. Aside from this rather glaring omission, it's an interesting book. The writing is brisk, there's enough on each story to set you off to find more if it's to your taste. I could wish for more pictures, but in the day of the internet I suppose you can all do what I do, and google up each boat as it appears in the book for a better look. I do wish I could find something, anything, on that dratted "Spirit of Cleveland".

There's a nice bibliography at the end of the book, and a section on "Other notable voyages". I enjoyed seeing Verlen Kruger make the cut, I camped out next to him at the first Watertribe challenge in Florida a few years before he passed away.

So, I don't intend to appear unkind about this. The book is for the most part fine in what it covers. I do wish we could stop paying attention to silly freakshows like 4' boats sailing across the Atlantic, it only encourages them, but I suppose if I want a book that says what I think I should write it myself. If you like boats you'll like this book, I think, and you'll certainly run into some stories you hadn't heard before.

By Bill Marsano. William Longyard has assembled a truly delightful collection of nearly six dozen stories of voyages in really deep water by people in ridiculously small--and sometimes just plain ridiculous--boats. Buy it pronto, put it on your nightstand; promise yourself you won't read more than one story per night. OK? (Of course you can always start over.)

There is, apparently, no profile that fits these people. Some are desperate, such as the Englishmen held as slavery in Algeria: They made a daring escape in a folding boat they built themselves. (In 1644!) Some are godful folk determined to spread the Holy Word. Some seek fame and others seek love; a few hope to make great heaps of money as profitable novelties. Others have had their adventure gene cross wires with their crackpot gene (an alarming number of them begin with absolutely nautical experience whatsoever). Doesn't matter: Their stories are wonderful and hair-raising.

Their craft are various. There's a Jeep and a succession of boats designed to take the record for Atlantic crossing by the world's smallest boat. There are kayaks, canoes, undecked sloops, a mold plug and a pair of water-walking pontoons. There are rowboats, of course, and my only (and very minor) complaint is that Longyard doesn't include the best sardonic nautical quotation I've ever run into: When a couple of British ex-soldiers finally completed their transoceanic row, a reporter asked how they felt at having "beaten the Atlantic Ocean." To which one of them replied, "We didn't beat the Atlantic. It let us go."

Longyard makes up for this with his chapter on Capt. Franz Romer, who kleppered the Atlantic in the 1920s--first man to do it. All these years we've been allowed to believe he took a stock Klepper off the rack, but that is apparently far from the truth.

Every reader will have his own favorite amongst these stories; mine is that of Paul Strogis. A Latvian on the run from the Russian army (which wanted to draft him) and the German police (who feared he was a dangerous socialist, or worse), he traveled widely, working his passage, and fetched up in Australia, there to slowly starve as he pined for love until it struck him that he must emigtrate to the U.S., 9000 miles away, in a boat of his own devising.

So he set about to learn everything he needed to know to build, sail and navigate a boat from books in the public library. He built his own sextant from scrap hacksaw blades. And then God bless him he set off.

There are lots of black-and-white pix here; they're nice and grainy--just vague enough to inspire more madcap dreaming.--Bill Marsano's adventures in his Feathercraft folding kayak have been pretty bloody demure but still sufficient to scare him silly.

Great book, but with this title and he forgot Oskar Speck?
In the 1930s Oskar Speck left looking for work with his folding kayak from Germany on route to Cyprus. When he arrived there he decided to continue onwards and a few years later he arrived at Thursday Island, Australia. Unfortunately WWII had just started and he got interned. He staid in Australia for the rest of his life and died only a few years ago.


for a reproduction of an interview wioth him look for:
www.nswseakayaker.asn.au/mag/50/oscarspeck1.htm

For anyone desiring to leave it all behind for foreign lands in a boat less that thirty feet long, this is a MUST READ. It presents a long chronological set of stories, carefully researched by the author, of the miraculous and foolish in small boat passage making. Seventy voyages are examined, with many of them intertwined as the sailors were inspired by yet other sailors to take on the world and themselves. A great appendix is also included, with research sources, and practical advice on what it would mean today to take on such a voyage. Highly recommended, and well written.

I was tickled to discover a couple of weeks ago that our 1980's voyage from Miami to Australia with 18' "Pere Peinard" made mention in Longyard's excellent compendium. I was suprised and grateful for the "1/15th second of fame" since it's mainly remarkable for being unremarkable! Nothing broke at all except the wallet and a world record (26 days, under 25' LOA) for the Galapagos-Marquesas crossing in 26 days, 1983. Is this still standing? (Ok, after 6 great years, the marriage broke up too, but hey. Not the friendship! No regrets!) We made every intended destination (except Sydney, had to settle for Brisbane. At 3 knots bare-pole:) Our 5 yrs under sail were remarkably easy and beautiful, thanks to a really solid boat, careful work, and the grace of god/dess. In oceanic terms, even the Titanic is but a Speck on the Sea. So, I very much appreciate the respect Longyard has conveyed towards the WHOLE spectrum of small boat sailors! Isn't that what we all are, really? On this planet? In this universe?

If you love the sea, you will love this book. But if you are looking for a page turner that will excite lubbers, this is not for you. You have to be one who has "gone down to the sea" in order to appreciate all of the detail on all of the voyages, and in order to understand just what these guys were up against. If you fall in that category, this is for you!