Product Review

In A SINGLE WAVE, Webb Chiles, one of the most experienced sailors in history, five time circumnavigator, provides the dramatic highlights of two decades in three boats: EGREGIOUS, a 37-foot cutter; CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE, an 18-foot open undecked yawl; and RESURGAM, a 36-foot sloop. In these boats he made more than three circumnavigations, twice alone, twice setting world records, twice via Cape Horn, which he was the first American to round alone.

The stories include capsizes in a cyclone in the Tasman and in a storm in the Southern Ocean; drifting for two weeks and three hundred miles in the South Pacific after a swamping west of Fiji; a twenty-six hour swim in the Gulf Stream covering about one hundred and thirty miles after a sinking off Florida; and enough other troubles in exotic climes from Tahiti to the Red Sea to South Africa to Bali to New Jersey.

Webb Chiles has pushed limits, his own and the species, for more than forty years. He still is, presently making his sixth circumnavigation, this time in a 24' ultra-light sloop.

It is often said that Webb Chiles is one of a kind and that few others can describe the beauty and danger of the sea as well as he. He has been called sailing's best living writer.

Writer, poet and sailor, Webb Chiles thinks of himself as an artist. He has said that the artist's defining responsibility is to go to the edge of human experience and send back reports. A SINGLE WAVE consists of some of his most vivid and moving reports.