My bookshelf·Index Subject

Sailing & Paddling

6 books

No. 0095 Memoir · South America

180º South: Conquerers of the Useless

Yvon Chouinard

The 1968 journey to Patagonia by Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins is the stuff of legend, and from it epic tales and giant companies were sparked. Four decades later, Jeff Johnson retraced their travels for Chris Malloy’s 2010 film, 180°…

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180º South: Conquerers of the Useless
No. 0096 Memoir · Alaska

Paddling North: A Solo Adventure Along the Inside Passage

Audrey Sutherland

Audrey Sutherland paddled a nine-foot inflatable kayak up the Inside Passage from Ketchikan, alone, in her sixties, in summer after summer until she’d done the whole eight hundred and fifty miles. No support, no motor, food she’d dehydrated herself, camping…

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Paddling North: A Solo Adventure Along the Inside Passage
No. 0056 Fiction · No fixed address

The River

Peter Heller

Award-winning writer Peter Heller has traveled the world as an expedition kayaker from the High Pamirs of Tajikistan to Central America to Peru. Which is to say, few can write about rivers—their shifting colors, sounds, and moods—like Heller. Now the…

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The River
No. 0077 Anthology · No fixed address

The Sea Journal: Seafarers’ Sketchbooks

Huw Lewis-Jones

Facsimile pages from the private logbooks and sketchbooks of people at sea across four centuries. Naval officers, whalers, a ship’s surgeon, naturalists, a young woman on an emigrant voyage, modern sailors and marine biologists. Watercolors of coastlines drawn as navigational…

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The Sea Journal: Seafarers’ Sketchbooks
No. 0041 Narrative Nonfiction · Eastern U.S.

The Survival of the Bark Canoe

John McPhee

Henri Vaillancourt was in his twenties in Greenville, New Hampshire, building birchbark canoes by hand — no plans, no power tools, bark peeled off standing trees, split spruce root for lashing, pitch for the seams — because almost nobody was…

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The Survival of the Bark Canoe
No. 0093 Memoir · California

Two Years Before the Mast

Richard Henry Dana

Dana was a Harvard student whose eyes gave out, so in 1834 he shipped out of Boston as a common sailor rather than a passenger, rounded the Horn, and spent two years working the hide trade on the California coast…

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Two Years Before the Mast