Sailing & Paddling

The companion book to Jeff Johnson's film about retracing the 1968 journey of Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia. Part surf trip, part climbing expedition, part environmental reckoning. Johnson sails, hitchhikes, and climbs his way to the edge of the world — and finds it being sold off piece by piece.

Erin McKittrick and her husband traveled 4,000 miles from Seattle to the Aleutian Islands by human power — hiking, packrafting, and skiing through some of the wildest country in North America. A young couple's journey through a landscape most people will never see.

Set in the Pacific Northwest, Before the Wind is a deeply funny fictional account of a lovably maddening family that communicates best through sailing. (Wes Anderson, please option the film rights.) There’s a loudmouth dad—Where’s the wind? No! Those waves are old news!—a try-to-fix-everything middle son, a precocious daughter who can out-sail nearly everyone, and a grandpa who dreams in boat design schemata. Dysfunctional, maybe, but boy can the Johannssens race. If boating is in your DNA, you might recognize yourself here. If you don’t know a thing about boating, you’ll learn a lot—about sailing legends like Joshua Slocum, insight into the siren song of racing, and things to consider before buying that “free” boat in your neighbor’s backyard. Ultimately, the story reminds us adventure is often the best therapy, and that it’s wildly rewarding to trust some of life’s decisions to the wind.

Not Lansing's book but Frank Worsley's — the navigator of the Endurance tells his own version of the story. The 800-mile open-boat journey across the Southern Ocean, narrated by the man who navigated it with a sextant and dead reckoning. The seamanship alone is worth reading.

Alfred Lansing's account of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition is the gold standard of survival literature. When Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed by pack ice in 1915, he kept 27 men alive through an Antarctic winter, an open-boat crossing of the Southern Ocean, and a traverse of South Georgia Island that had never been attempted. Lansing tells it in prose as spare and relentless as the ice itself.

Peter Heller's account of the first attempt to kayak the Tsangpo Gorge in Tibet — the deepest canyon on earth, with rapids that had never been run. One member of the team drowned. The others kept going. Adventure journalism at its most committed.

Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho connected over a shared love of paddling as teenagers at a Minnesotan outdoor camp. Later, as college graduation approached, Raiho suggested an expedition inspired by the 1935 book Canoeing with the Cree, a classic outdoors tale of two men who paddled from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, wending two thousand miles through muddy rivers, whitewater rapids, windy lakes, polar bear country, and dozens of riverfront towns and Indigenous communities. Aiming to be the first women to undertake the route, they set off in a seventeen-foot Langford Prospector dubbed Kawena Kinomaeta, meaning “no worries” in Cree, and eventually adopted a tough scruff of a dog named Myhan as their third boat companion. Hudson Bay Bound shares all the exuberance, self-doubt, relationship spats, exhaustion, and basic truths of their three-month voyage: “When in doubt, don’t think too much, and walk around the block in your hiking boots.” Isn’t it time you planned a big adventure with your best friend?

Nathaniel Philbrick's account of the Essex, the Nantucket whaling ship rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820 — the event that inspired Moby-Dick. The crew's subsequent ordeal in open boats is one of the most harrowing survival stories in maritime history.

Thor Heyerdahl's account of crossing the Pacific on a balsa-wood raft to prove that ancient South Americans could have settled Polynesia. The theory is debatable. The voyage is not — 101 days on the open ocean with five companions and a parrot, armed with a hypothesis and no backup plan.

Through photography, interviews, crew stories, and a foreword by Desmond Tutu, the hardcover Mālama Honua shares the travels of a double-hulled canoe named Hōkūle’a. Built in the 1970s, this sailing canoe was created to revive the art and science of ancient Polynesian wayfinding techniques: understanding the distinct patterns of ocean swells, reading the stars for clues, predicting the weather from animal behavior and wind. No GPS, National Weather Service, or Apple products allowed. Because as one of the book’s modern day navigators says, “If you can read the ocean…you will never be lost.” The book begins in 2014 and covers a multi-year boat journey to communities in New Zealand, Australia, Africa, and South and North America, steered onward by captain Nainoa Thompson, the first native Hawaiian since the 14th century to sail without modern instruments from Hawaii to Tahiti. Visually luscious, educationally inspiring, and totally badass—how many times have you relied upon your smartphone today?—this book is a treasure of hard-won knowledge and experience.

The book that defined the sport. Technical, practical, and written by the man who proved you could carry a boat in your backpack and open up terrain that was previously inaccessible.

Solo paddling along the coasts of the Hawaiian Islands — reefs, open crossings, and the kind of self-reliance that comes from decades of doing things alone in the ocean.

A solo kayak journey up Alaska's Inside Passage at age 60-something. No support boat, no satellite phone, no concessions to age. Pure competence and joy.

The first of the Sutherland trilogy — solo paddling along Molokai's sea cliffs, sleeping on ledges, swimming into sea caves. A woman alone with the Pacific, entirely on her own terms.

A solo sailing journey from Seattle to Juneau through the Inside Passage, reading the water and the history simultaneously. The sea as text — tides, currents, and the layers of meaning left by the people who navigated these waters before engines existed.

Gestalten's survey of floating architecture — houseboats, sailing vessels, and structures built on or over water. The aesthetic of life afloat.

Four college-age rowers crossed the North Atlantic in a 29-foot boat. Fifty-seven days, no motor, no support vessel. The youth and audacity are the point.

The first solo circumnavigation of the globe by sail, completed in 1898 in a 37-foot sloop. Understated, self-reliant, and the ancestor of every solo sailing narrative written since.

Gestalten's photography of sailing — blue water, wooden hulls, and the geometry of canvas and wind.

The nearly forgotten story of William Willis, who sailed a raft across the Pacific at age 61, then did it again at 73. A character so improbable he makes Heyerdahl look cautious.

The navigator's account of the 800-mile open-boat crossing from Elephant Island to South Georgia — the most dangerous small-boat voyage in history. Where Lansing gives you the panorama, this gives you the tiller.

A solo kayak journey through Alaska's Inside Passage — tides, bears, weather, and the particular solitude of traveling by paddle. Quieter and less known than it should be.

Seven years sailing solo around the Pacific on a 40-foot boat, surfing remote breaks, and learning to live without a plan. A young woman's voyage that became a way of life. One of the best adventure memoirs of the last decade.

Having been a marina live-aboard for over three years, I know how many would-be sailors dream of bluewater voyages. But with trip logistics and obligations in the way, even the most dialed boaters rarely leave port. Against the odds, with a combination of good fortune, bartending shifts, and more than a year of hard boat prep, Liz Clark cast off from Santa Barbara in her early 20s and she’s been sailing and surfing the world ever since. Over a decade and 20,000 nautical miles later, Captain Clark brings us Swell, a memoir named after her beloved 1966 Cal-40. It’s a life seemingly so charmed it scarcely seems real, but Clark shares both sunshine and grime, from remote tropical islands and a surf sisterhood to broken-down engines and relationships both damaging and generous. With enchanting illustrations and photos, Swell offers an open-hearted exploration of how to stay aloft from one safe anchorage to the next, navigating the unknown terrain in between.

Willis sailed a raft across the Pacific at 61, then again at 73. The voyages were more dangerous and more improbable than Kon-Tiki, and almost nobody remembers them.

Theroux paddled a kayak through the islands of the Pacific — Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia — in his characteristically abrasive, observant, and entertaining style. The kayak was the excuse; the cultures were the subject.

Tilman was the greatest explorer-mountaineer of the twentieth century and among the most eccentric. He climbed Nanda Devi, sailed to the Arctic in his seventies, and disappeared at sea at 79. The biography matches the subject — spare, tough, admirable.

Ed Gillet kayaked solo from Monterey to Hawaii in 1987 — 2,200 miles of open Pacific, no support boat. The most audacious solo ocean crossing by human power ever attempted. Almost nobody knows about it.

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 Colorado author of the bestselling dystopian novel The Dog Stars merges his paddling experience with his mastery of suspenseful stories. The River tells of two earnest young men, college best friends from different backgrounds: Wynn, a Vermonter with a goofy smile who learned to canoe at summer camp, and Jack, a tough, skeptical rancher from the Rockies who grew up working outside. With fly rods and smoking pipes and a few good books, they’ve set off on a monthlong canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness, but the adventure takes an ominous turn from the start. Our one copy at Adventure Journal headquarters already has a long waitlist, so be ready to pass this gorgeously written thriller around.

Heat-Moon traveled across America entirely by water — rivers, canals, lakes, portages — from New York to Oregon. A coast-to-coast journey on the country's forgotten highway system.

Field sketches from centuries of ocean voyaging — navigators, naturalists, and sailors drawing what they saw before cameras existed. Lewis-Jones curates the art of observation at sea.

London's novel about a literary critic shanghaied aboard a sealing schooner captained by Wolf Larsen — a Nietzschean brute who reads Herbert Spencer between beatings. The Pacific Ocean as a classroom in survival of the fittest.

Freeman Dyson designs starships at Princeton; his son George builds a kayak and lives in a treehouse in British Columbia. A book about two kinds of exploration — one into space, one into the wild — and the father-son rift between them.

McPhee travels through the Maine woods in a birch bark canoe built by Henri Vaillancourt — a young craftsman obsessed with replicating the ancient Algonquin design. The canoe is beautiful. The canoe builder is difficult. McPhee documents both.

The adventure novel that invented the genre. A boy, a map, a one-legged pirate, and an island full of buried gold. Stevenson wrote it for children and created something that adults can't put down either.

Dana shipped out of Boston as a common sailor in 1834 and wrote the most vivid account of seafaring life in the age of sail. The California coast before the gold rush, described by a Harvard man doing manual labor.

Worsley sailing in Arctic waters — the navigator of the Endurance on his own, in the ice, doing what he was born to do.