Lin very kindly sent us a pre-release copy of her new book Passages: Cape Horn and Beyond1 (available October 15th). I have long been a fan of Lin’s writing but this is my favourite yet, I inhaled it.
And that’s coming from a guy who does not read (or watch) a single cruising account from one year to the next, since I find that most are of the “we went here and then we went there” variety, which I find a snore. Lin avoids that problem, particularly in her later writing—Bull Canyon is another of my favourites, and Taleisin’s Tales is on my to-read list.
In this book, Lin starts with a chapter about her new cruising life—yup, she is back out there—and then turns the clock back to an epic east to west (the hard way) engineless rounding of Cape Horn, the crowning achievement of her voyages with Larry, and one of the great small-boat seamanship achievements of our time.
There is much more on the joys of voyaging, with many lessons to learn, but for me the most important part of the book, and the most affecting, was her tender account of Larry’s slow loss of his prodigious strength, health, and eventual descent into dementia.
Yes, I know, that sounds pretty depressing and might put you off. Don’t let it.
Each of us who voyage on the sea, and through life, will eventually have to deal with not being able to do the things we once did—at age 73, I should know—and Lin’s story of how she and Larry coped with that by transitioning gracefully, and even joyfully, into life-after-cruising is a part of the book we can all learn from.
She is also frank and constructive about the difficulties that arise when one partner wants to stop cruising and the other is desperate to carry on. A situation that many, perhaps most voyaging couples will face sooner or later, a time when Lin’s insights will help too.
So stop watching those YouTube videos about lithium batteries, the latest multi-million dollar unattainable boat, or beefcake and bimbos cavorting, and dive into Passages: Cape Horn and Beyond.
Not only will you be entertained and enchanted by two love stories and some epic cruises, you will also learn things that will help you lead a happier cruising, and after cruising, life…all that and invaluable cruising and seamanship lessons too.
- Although I linked to Amazon to make it easy for you to buy Lin’s books, we don’t get a dime if you do. I wrote this review purely because I really liked the book. We don’t use affiliate links since we consider them a source of bias. ↩︎