Blue Water, Green Skipper: A Memoir of Sailing Alone Across the Atlantic

Blue Water, Green Skipper: A Memoir of Sailing Alone Across the Atlantic

Stuart Woods had never owned more than a dinghy before setting out on one of the world’s most demanding sea voyages, navigating single-handedly across the Atlantic. How, at the age of thirty-seven, did this self-proclaimed novice go from small ponds to the big sea? Now with a new afterword that looks back at how one transatlantic race changed his life, Woods takes readers on a spectacular journey not just of traveling across the world, but of being tried in fire, learning by accepting challenges, appreciating the beauty of the open water, and living to tell about it. Praise for BLUE WATER, GREEN SKIPPER: "A well-told tale of adversity and triumph on the high seas, this fine work deserves a new and wide audience."-- Booklist Stuart Woods is the author of over forty-five novels, including the New York Times–bestselling Stone Barrington and Holly Barker series. He is a native of Georgia and began his writing career in the advertising industry. Chiefs , his debut in 1981, won the Edgar Award.  An avid sailor and pilot, Woods lives in New York City, Florida, and Maine. One Istood in this place for the second time in forty minutes, a small, neat bay, surrounded by low hills, white cottages, a ruined mansion, and an unspecified number of dairy cattle, chewing their way through the morning. This choppy stretch of water was covered by a churning gray sky and contained half a dozen small plastic buoys and an old stone pier. Perhaps “stood” constitutes sloppy use of the language, for about forty knots of wind had me leaning at an unnatural angle to the perpendicular and the hairs on the leeward side of my body standing at an equally unnatural angle to my skin. I had not yet learned that a mild, sunny beginning to an Irish morning does not obviate the necessity for a sheepskin coat and gumboots at a slightly later hour, and I could not, for the life of me, see the Galway Bay Sailing Club. I drove back to the Thatched Pub in Oranmore and explained my problem to its keeper. As he had already done twice on that morning, he began patiently to direct me to Rinville Bay. I interrupted to explain that I was certain I had found the bay but could not find the clubhouse. “Ah,” said George the innkeeper, with the raised eyebrows of the enlightened, “there’s not a clubhouse, y’see; there’s just theclub, like.” I gaped at him uncomprehendingly, unable to shake my preconception of the neat building, the flagpole, and the ruddy-faced chaps gathered in the net-draped bar. George leapt into the silence, which every Irishman abhors: “There’s just the club, and I’d say they’re not likely to be out just yet.” It was March, I had to give him that, but it was a Sunday too, and the paperback I had read had led me to believe that your enthusiastic yachtsman, if not actually on the water nowabouts, would at least be varnishing or splicing something in preparation for the event, and if not that, knocking a few back and talking about it at the very least. George fixed his gaze on the Guinness pump handle before him, trying hard to be helpful. “Pierce Purcell,” he said, looking relieved. “You’d want to speak to Pierce Purcell, he’s the secretary or one of the people, like, and you’d find him in the book.” The Irish Department of Posts and Telegraphs, because of the small size of the country, the low density of the population, and its own extreme reluctance to provide any of them with a telephone, has managed to gather all the nation’s telephone listings into just one directory, which is, in size, roughly equal to the combined bulk of the Old Testament, the New Testament,the I Ching, and The Joy of Sex. It proved to contain at least a page of closely spaced Purcells, far too many of them P.’s, P.J.’s and even Pierces, and none of them in Galway. George tried again. “Ferdia O’Riordan,” he said, this time with real conviction. The book offered us even more O’Riordans than Purcells, but no Ferdias in Galway. “The Bank of Ireland,” said George with finality. “That’s where he works, at the branch in Salthill.” But in Ireland only the pubs are open on a Sunday, so I thanked George and postponed my search for sailing yet another day. Sailing had been wafting around the hindmost part of my head since the summer of 1966, when friends had invited me to their summer home in Castine, Maine, and, back in my native USA, taken me sailing every day the wind blew. I had been enchanted with the notion that one could move across the face of the waters, fueled by nothing more than the wind, and I had resolved that if ever I were domiciled in any reasonable proximity to the sea I would learn to sail upon it. I thought, even, that since so much of the world was covered with water and since it lapped against so many interesting places, that I should like to sail right the way round, stopping everywhere. Eventually, I finished a ten-year hitch in New York advertising, did another three in London, and then, propelled by a lifelong desire to write A Novel, hied myself