A good looking, successful, happily married couple whose younger son is going off to college take the cruise of their lifetime on a sloop from their home port, Seattle, to about 90 miles south of the Alaska border — up among the islands that stud the Pacific coast of British Columbia.
Sounds like a perfect book for me though their’s was only a two month cruise of 1400 miles (round trip, with reportage on only its outbound 700 mile half). This is as compared to our much longer cruise, by months and by miles, aboard our smaller ILENE, from New York City to Grenada West Indies. But Lene and I are a cruising couple like these folks and every cruise is thrilling, both those experienced on one’s own bottom and those just read about.
The book was a gift from our very well traveled Pacific Northwest friends who sailed with us in 2012 for several days aboard ILENE in the Turks and Caicos. Such a generous, thoughtful and perfect gift, from good, long-time, loyal friends, who apparently saw or read about the book and sent it to us. Great gift but for me, not a great book. I do enjoy reviewing even the books that I do not enjoy reading, however.
Sailing Vessel Heron was a 54 foot used Moody (high quality boat) that they had shipped by land from Rhode Island to Washington State. She was a center cockpit boat based on the photo and references to her aft deck. She had a wide 16 foot beam and her mast towered 75 feet above sea level. She had an in-mast furling main. I did not catch her draft or displacement, though they may have been mentioned; but overall a big, solid, comfortable, expensive boat.
II. Let me first praise the good things in the book.
The descriptions of nature and wildlife are brilliant, even if occasionally the figures of speech are far fetched. E.g., Heron had a “saurian rig”; it means “lizard like”? Heron had a schooner-like bow - not really, according to her photo. “The water glassy, spreading into gentle ovoids (ovoid means egg shaped) the size of hula hoops.” At 162. Of fish leaping out of the water: “...silver fat salmon flew past my head like jumbo jets.” At 227.
The front of the book has four hand drawn charts covering the coasts Heron passed, with a dotted line representing her track. I love maps and referred to these at least 100 times, with pleasure; they got me into the voyage. The only faults with them are that in addition to showing many of the places mentioned in the text which Heron passed or in which it anchored, there were at least 30 more geographic locations mentioned in the text but not labeled on the charts. Sheer laziness. And though hand drawn and hence not accurately to scale for navigation, a scale of miles on them would have been useful for estimating the lengths of each passage
Many episodes were meaningful to me because they described axperiences similar to ours, permitting me to compare and contrast theirs with my own cruising memories.
> The author mentioned that they had plotted the distances between ports to determine whether their cruise could be accomplished in the number of days available for it.
> I sympathized with the chronic lack of wind they experienced in August and September — like we have in Long Island Sound in July and August.
> Ms. Seely named and briefly sketched many of the people who they met and communicated with along the way. Such people make a cruise memorable. An evening social event, attended by seven, realistically captured such discussions among cruisers: a mixture of sea stories, philosophy and local knowledge. At 196-98.
> She included the names and very brief descriptions of the subjects of the books she was reading during the cruise. I like that.
> Heron’s mainsail once got stuck and could not be furled; we know that unpleasant and dangerous experience.
> That “The pine-needled path was soft and spongy under foot...” reminded me of the thick moss carpeted paths we trod on Long Island, Maine. Similarly the lack of “beach between forest and sea” on that island.
> The need for the couple to separate from each other occasionally was mentioned, at 227, though aboard ILENE this need arises in Lene, not me.
> The needed to employ a diver when their anchor got snagged on a big boulder; brought back memories of when ours got hung up on an antique lost anchor in Stonington, Maine.
> The husband’s anger and curses at his wife when she did not know how to unfurl the Genoa: he wanted her to become more than a mere passenger with helm and cooking skills; I think I handled my disappointment with Lene more patiently, and successfully without a display of anger.
> She even artfully described her strip tease and, lovemaking with her husband when she got horny in a cove at low tide, the tide barring entry to other boats and thereby affording absolute privacy. Only two of the activities that take place in ILENE’s pullman berth are described in my blog: sleeping and reading.
III. And here is what I did not enjoy:
A. Overemotion.
Ms. Seely goes on and on, over and over, about her empty nest with her sons going off to college, including even her recollection of their first day of kindergarten. The family interrupted the cruise for a week (after two only weeks). This was to fly from a coastal BC village with their younger son (after both boys had spent a week cruising aboard) to his college in upstate New York. She even described their search together in Bed Bath and Beyond there for extra-long sheets for him. This she repeatedly called “the Big Drop-Off”. Her emotions, upon returning to Heron, were physically violent, over-the-top, Wuthering Heights-grade outpourings of anguish:
“I exclaimed out of the blue, ‘I don’t like this; it’s not right.’ ... ‘It feels so off-balance ... like one of my arms has been accidentally misplaced, or a leg chopped off!’
‘I know. I think we’re both grieving,’ Jeff said sweetly.
‘Do you feel bad too?’ I asked him, surprised. ‘Physically bad?’
‘I do Bug,” he said. ...
‘Well, it sucks’ I said, reeling from the magnitude of it all, trying to fathom what this meant for all of us, moving forward. ... I felt like our hearts had been ripped out of our chests and were floating along the dock in front of us. ...
‘I don’t like this,‘ I said again in a sort of strangled voice. It was all I could think of to say.
‘I know you don’t,’ Jeff said. ‘I don’t like it either.’
...
I felt like we were swimming in space, adrift in quiet.
‘This is harder than I thought it would be,” I said, having the guys gone so suddenly, I feel sad, don’t you. Physically sad.’”
At 152-53
I wished she would just get over it! Enough already! But this empty nest theme recurred in the narrative repeatedly.
B. Exaggeration
So did her tone of triumphalism, which seemed unjustified to me. She claimed, at least twice, that the waters were, like the name of the book “uncharted”. While the scale of their charts at those points may have been too small to provide useful depth information in tiny, little used coves, the area was definitely charted.
And at 65, their destination was “fantastically remote“ and “way beyond the end of the road.” But on our trip to southern Alaska, hundreds of miles further north, we saw marinas full of cruising sailboats.
C. Redundancy
The writing was often painfully redundant, of which this is the prime example:
- Anchored in Hartley Bay, this was “the apex of our trip”. at 244. But not really, because the chart shows Heron’s track proceeded perhaps (no scale) ten miles further to round the north end of Gribbell Island.
- On the next page: “Utterly spent, I was relieved we’d made it all the way (“all the way” is useless surplusage) to Hartley Bay, the northernmost point of our journey...”
- Again, on page 249, also regarding Hartley Bay, “But despite our frayed nerves, we’d reached the northernmost point of our journey.”
- When they had later indeed motored to the north end of Gribbell Island: “... we’d reached the apex of our trip, having travelled close to seven hundred ... nautical miles.” At 258.
- Ten lines later, on the same page, “I stood in the cockpit, steering Heron up a channel called Verney Passage the northernmost point of our whole trip.” (“whole” like “all the way” is padding.) “All the way” also appeared, twice, at 195.
She also marvels that they were “alone”, “just the two of us”, etc, five times on pages 168-69.
D. Writing Style
And both at 105 and 166, she launches into paragraphs that mass the word “you” when she is referring to herself — more than once per line in those uncharacteristic paragraphs. “One” would have been preferable to “I” in my eyes and definitely better than ”you”.
I guess I just did not like her style. Readers of this blog, know how diametrically opposite my account of our sailing adventures is from this book in style and content. I include some emotions by saying that some events make me happy, sad, anxious or proud; but that’s it. For better or for worse I eschew over-emotional writing and describe the facts. I think that Ms. Seely’s way sells books; she is a well published award winning writer for National Geographic and other travel magazines. She milks her accounts for dramatic tension, withholding the punchlines until the end to build suspense. My Joe Friday style: “Just the facts, Mam”, with the conclusion as the headline, does not turn people on. Perhaps I can learn from Ms. Seely.
And my blog includes log-like details about the sailing— distance of each passage from port to anchorage to marina. Time, speed and distance are functions of each other: from any two, the third can be calculated. The speed of a sailboat, especially when sailing, is not constant but affected by the constantly changing tidal flows and the frequently changing wind. But Ms. Seely’s few mentions of speed did not match up with reality. My style, creates a more pedestrian but comprehensive account of a cruise than that contained in this book.
E. Mistakes that slow the careful reader
There are also plain errors in the book, some that a qualified nautically oriented proofreader or editor should have caught.
Several times, at points where (a) the boat’s track and heading is shown on the chart to be in a particular direction and (b) the wind direction is described in the text, the book says that (c) they were on a particular point of sail, for example, on a beam reach. A point of sail, is totally a function of course and wind direction and in the book, one of the three of necessity was in error. At 167.
They received a friendly call via VHF radio from a passing boat, who hailed Heron by name (either by an unlikely visual sighting of the name on the hull, or by AIS, which method was not mentioned) but the caller did not announce her name, i.e., no “Heron this is ________.” At 77.
They were passed by “an eight-hundred-foot long Evergreen container ship ... as long as two football fields.” At 49. Bad simple math.
Another time she said they were sailing “north at 349 degrees”. That compass heading is north north west, not north.
“It was maybe fifty-four degrees [farenheit] out” at 221. “Maybe” implies an estimate, not a measurement, and no one estimates temperature more closely than in five degree increments. So why?
The wind was “off the stern quarter” is again just bad usage. A boat has two quarters, its port and the starboard quarters. If the wind is off the stern, it is not off a quarter, and if from a quarter, it is not from astern.
In Johnstone Sound, discussing 2-3 foot high “swells” and “rollers” (relatively wide but flat waves) she wrote ”But Heron crushed the furlers” [with] her heavy hull...” Her roller furling sails could be described as furlers, but the boat was crushing waves, not her own sails! At 125.
Following retrieval of the boat’s anchor, but with the loss of 220 feet of its chain, they purchased a like length of nylon line and her husband “wove” it to the chain! NO! To attach a line (rope) to a chain is to “rove” it, not ‘weave” it. At 95.
She claims that they were novice sailors, thereby enhancing her wonder at the discovery of the new experience, but revealed that husband Jeff had grown up sailing and crewed on several Bermuda races.
She referred several times to the Cruising Guide they used, but then claimed that they were “surprised” to learn that they would not have cell phone service along much of the northern stretch. Really?
She described Heron as a cutter, which is a boat characterized by a staysail and the book includes the boat’s photo and it has no staysail!
She claimed she did not know how to put the boat into reverse gear, but they had been sailing from off a dock near Seattle all the prior summer. At 63.
IV. Conclusion
She introduced two non sailing sub-themes that involved significant small parts of the book. These were quests to see things unique to the area near their destination. First, her quest to see a rare Kermode or Spirit Bear (a white or honey colored Black Bear) had been a goal of the voyage from the beginning. Later, her husband added a quest to visit an unmapped, ancient, semi decayed, Native American tribal log meeting house. I will not reveal whether or not either or both of those goals were achieved. Suspense was built about these quests.
Altogether, I did not enjoy the book, though in checking the reader reviews at Amazon, it got very high marks. So mine is the dissenting view.
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