Books and DVDs

We’ve all dreamed of traveling the world—not just a quick vacation, but a real globe-trotting adventure. For most of us, the realities interfered with the dreams. How do you finance a year of travel, where should you go, what is the best way to get there, and what do you do about visas, vaccines, and viruses? In The Practical Nomad, Edward Hasbrouck—renowned travel writer and ex-travel

With AutoCAD and computational fluid dynamics now casting long shadows across the field of sailboat design, it’s important to go back and learn how the game started, who the leading practitioners were, and what craft came from their drawing boards. There couldn’t be a better tour guide than L. FrancisHerreshoff for this particular magical journey into the past. He was a son of Captain Nat,

Maritime journalist Dallas Murphy is on a quest to quell the alarmists, debunk the deniers, and depolarize the global-warming debate with an active, intelligent discussion of how man-made changes to the ocean ecosystem can have a lasting effect on the earth’s climate. To Follow the Water is a conversation starter that navigates readers through the annals of oceanography, catalogues the

Adventure annals are rife with mystery. Take George Mallory and Andrew Irving’s 1924 Mount Everest attempt; the two vanished, their fate murky until their mummified corpses were recently found. In sailing, what happened to Donald Crowhurst (and why) during the 1968–69 Golden Globe Race, the first nonstop solo-circumnavigation race, is equally ambiguous. His boat, Teignmouth Electron, was

When Mary South quit her job, sold her house, and floated her life’s savings on a 40-foot steel-hulled trawler, she abandoned her landlocked reality in search of adventure, purpose, and peace at sea.The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water is South’s account of her transformation from successful publishing executive to eager seamanship student to beaming skipper aboard her newly

I well remember the first time I went to sea on a cruising boat. Uncertain of what would happen next, I always seemed to be in the wrong place. The deck was a mass of ropes, the terminology—which sounded like Greek to me—was all unfamiliar, and I was probably more of a liability than a help. I enjoyed myself tremendously. Reading whatever books I could lay my hands on, I tried to become more

By David SchmidtIt’s not often that sailors also make their marks as musicians, but Caribbean local Davis Murray has achieved this feat with the release of his pre-release demo CD, Barefoot Davis (ISW Records). The album, which Murray self-describes as “country Caribbean” has obvious influences including Bob Marley and Jimmy Buffet, but with plenty of originality and true

Part of the fun of sailing at night is learning about the light combinations displayed by other vessels. “Two whites one above the other, plus a green and a red, that means—aaarggh!” The novice crew aboard will probably feel much more relaxed with a LIGHTrule in the cockpit. This $24.99 quick-reference tool shows 60 different light configurations as you’ll see them from the cockpit and includes a

Maptech has released a DVD containing 2,300 NOAA nautical charts and 730 river charts, along with GPS navigation software. The software lets you create waypoints and routes on a computer, and if you hook your GPS up to an onboard laptop, your boat’s position will be displayed in real time. It also lets you print out route plans and chart segments. Charts are arranged by region and can be updated