Tania Aebi

The author is frighteningly immature and unprepared, but she is after all still a teenager. She benefits from a lot of luck, but impressively sets her sights on an around-the-world voyage, and goes for it. Quite an experience! The writing is nothing special, though.

> Out of the past two and a half years, I had spent 360 days alone at sea, pressing ever westward, ever homeward. This final landfall would close the circle

> To every problem there is a solution. This time it was the sextant. I had been using the plastic one that had been aboard my father’s boat, Pathfinder. Through the years the plastic must have warped because the angles I was getting between the sun and horizon were slightly off. An unaligned sextant will get you nowhere. Luckily, in the bottom of one of my lockers lived an excellent aluminum Freiberger sextant.

> Men and women in colorful costumes sang religious songs and danced in front of a veranda where the king and his entourage sat holding court. The dancers had petroleum jelly smeared all over their arms and shoulders, and onlookers stuck paper money on their favorites, in this way making a collection for a new building.

> There were two general stores with the inevitable Sao crackers and Laughing Cow cheese with the wedges fitting into the familiar round box. Ever since Tahiti, this had become my standard sea fare, as it was always the cheapest and easiest to prepare.… (más)

In my GR favorite quotes you'll find the following: "There's nothing ... absolutely nothing ... half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats" -these words of Kenneth Grahame's from Wind in the Willows were cemented in my mind by my boat building father from such a young age that I can't remember ever not knowing them! or doubting them. After reading Aebi's memoir, it is clear that these words of wisdom are still worth quoting today! If you ever wake up and question whether what you're doing is worthwhile, for god's sake take the day off and get out on the water! if you need to take a couple years off and sail around the world or simply around the same little lake every day, I'm not sure if it even matters where you go! Just get in the boat!… (más)

Considering the total lack of proper preparation, it is amazing that she survived even her first passage. But the, considering her disfunctional parents, it is almost as amazing that she survived to set off. Not a bad book, but the whole situation was rather surreal. Most of her problems were brought on by shear carelessness. I kept wincing at the way things were not properly stowed, use of breakable containers, problems with the boat that a short shakedown cruise would have found and solved before getting caught by them in the middle of the ocean ...… (más)