Overview

The enthralling account of the 1996/7 Vendee Globe round-the-world yacht race, a story of heroism, adventure and tragic loss of life on the high seas. 'One of the best books ever written about sailing' Time 'One of the best books ever written about sailing' Time 27,000 miles, three and a half to five months alone at sea, chilling casualty rates, the unrelenting strain of handling 60-foot boats day and night, the absolute certainty of weather and waves that could destroy them. On 3 November 1996 sixteen sailors set out from the Bay of Biscay to embark on the Vendee Globe - a single-handed yacht race through the world's most treacherous and isolated seas. Of the sixteen starters only six completed the course, six others withdrew or were disqualified, three were plucked from sinking boats and one disappeared without trace. This is a book about the sea- how we are dawn to it and how it repels us and about why these men and women risk everything to embark on such a perilous journey. TWENTIETH ANNIVESARY EDITION, WITH A NEW FOREWORD FROM THE AUTHOR.

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9780224059718

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Reviews

Non-fiction it may be, but it contains all the tension of a thriller. -- Stuart Alexander The Independent This is a book which vividly transcends its immediate brief as a narrative of the race and those who sailed it, and presents a gripping and poetic evocation of the terrible and seductive power of the sea. -- John Tague The Independent on Sunday

They surfed at breakneck speeds of twenty-five knots or more down waves like steep hills in winds of near-hurricane strength : Just another day on the Vendee Globe, one of those single-handed, round-the-world sailing races that answer to the needs of sailors eager to reach their uttermost limits, vibrantly captured by Lundy (Scott Turow: Meeting the Enemy, not reviewed). The Vendee Globe demands that sailors take their boats 27,000 miles, unassisted and nonstop (the winner takes about 15 weeks), from France clown to Antarctica, pull a clockwise turn about the Pole, then beat it back to France. This means that most of the time the boats will be in the Southern Ocean, Lundy points out, that malevolent stew of relentless, homicidal low-pressure systems that are also known as the roaring forties, furious fifties, and screaming sixties. Lundy follows the 1996-97 race, which featured the surreal contemporaneity of some boats finding the charmed path while others were so piteously beaten by heavy weather they would have been happy with 80-foot waves and at least a part of their masts. Call it apocalyptic sailing in what one sailor terms a miserable, mean, vicious place, the kind that attracts sailors not given to solemn ecstasy; they court this insanity and it all feels a little pathological. Few got to enjoy the exhilarating flat-out, downwind rush of Southern Ocean sledding ; more typical were acts of extreme heroism. You don't abandon someone in trouble in so remote a place; at one moment they sail through the point on earth farthest from land, some 1,660 miles out. Only a few astronauts have ever been farther from land than a person on a vessel at that position. And the astronauts weren't in a capsized sailboat, with a finger chopped off, up to their neck on a freezing ocean, and without food or water. Lundy does a marvelous job of keeping all the contestants in the action and unspooling this tale of high-seas terror with flair rather than melodrama. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Derek Lundy is the author of six books. He lives on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.

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