Sailing for Home : A Voyage from Antigua to Kinsale

What happens when four people, three old sea hands and a novice (the author) cross the Atlantic aboard a 70-foot schooner? Theo Dorgan's logbook of the voyage of the Spirit of Oysterhaven from the Caribbean to the coast of Co. Cork is meditative, philosophical, and utterly absorbing. Dorgan captures the quotidian realities of a trans-Atlantic passage the importance of innumerable small rituals, the challenge of cooking in rough seas, the unspoken understandings that develop between crew members but he also attends to the numinous possibilities of life at sea: the rare vividness of dreams, visits from the ghosts of dead friends. By turns richly comic and deeply moving, "Sailing for Home" is the story of a mental and spiritual adventure as much as a physical one, a chronicle of an ordinary encounter between man and sea.