Want to read a good sailing book ?
I just got done with this one, and highly recommend it:

“Voyage of the Norman D.”, by Barbara Newhall Follett (1928). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

It is a delightful and unusual book. It is about the author’s first sailing voyage, on a three-masted schooner, still in service as a commercial cargo ship. The unusual nature, of the author, is a secret I’m not going to tell.

Here is some excerpts:

“…And now I began to see a strange, soft light over in the east. I watched and watched, and then I began to see the top of the full moon’s circle. Up and up she came, huge in the darkness, and shining like sunlight on snow. I had often dreamed of sailing by moonlight. And now my dreams were realized. Now the breeze held everything quiet, and, except for the swing and roll of the ship and the rushing of the foam divided by her cutwater, everything was silent—oh, so silent and beautiful !”

“…I had gone up forward for the simple purpose of looking at those moonlit sails from all parts of the ship. Now I saw the jibs once more from close up; and beautiful they were, rounded with wind, running up their slender points into the sky, and flooded with snowy moonlight like all the other great, majestic sails. Sometimes their rounded outer sides were huge, dome-like mountains with crowns of snow—mountains whose flanks were shadowed, but whose summits loomed out into the full moonlight. Then I looked over to the bow, and saw the foam down there, looking more than ever like two white wings. With the moonlight shining on it, it was ghostly white and curling—moonlight on newfallen mountain snow ! The sea itself, very dark green, mysteriously heaving and throbbing, was shadowy except on the eastern side, where the moonlight changed it to a delicate mass of quivering, shifting silver.”