Sailing to the Far Horizon: The Restless Journey and Tragic Sinking of a Tall Ship

by Pamela Sisman Bitterman

Overview

The tall ship Sofia sank off New Zealand’s North Island in February 1982, stranding its crew on disabled life rafts for five days. They struggled to survive as any realistic hope of rescue dwindled. Just a few years earlier, Pamela Sisman Bitterman was a naïve swabbie looking for adventure, signing on with a sailing co-operative taking this sixty-year-old, 123-foot, three-masted gaff-topsail schooner around the globe. The aged Baltic trader had been rescued from a wooden boat graveyard in Sweden and reincarnated as a floating commune in the 1960s. By the time Sofia went down, Bitterman had become an able seaman, promoted first to bos’un and then acting first mate, immersing herself in this life of a tall ship sailor, world traveler, and survivor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299201937
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	08/04/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Pamela Sisman Bitterman is author of Muzungu, a travel memoir of her experience in Kenya, and the children’s book When This Is Over, I Will Go to School, and I Will Learn to Read, which won a CBC Gold Medal and a Sharp Writ book award. She lives in San Diego, California.

Read an Excerpt

"I boarded the tall ship in Boston on August 20, 1978. We left the harbor bound for the Caribbean in the early dawn of October 25, marking the beginning of my maiden voyage aboard the Sofia. Those introductory months in port had proved interesting if not illuminating, productive without the benefit of certainty. I was there, but I did not yet belong. Had I not spent so much of my early life marching chin high, shoulders squared through unfamiliar territory in which I felt no semblance of belonging, I might have bolted for somewhere safe and something accustomed. But as before, the magnetic attraction of the unknown ignited my resolve to face that interminable feeling of aloneness."—excerpt from Sailing to the Far Horizon

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chronology

Introduction

Chapter 1 Joining the Sofia for Her Second Circumnavigation: Floating in Boston
Chapter 2 Into the Teeth of Hurricane Kendra: My Maiden Voyage
Chapter 3 Too Much Rum, Too Many Steel Drums: Too Long a Stay in the Windward Islands
Chapter 4 Old World, Third World, Unspoiled World: The Dutch Antilles, Venezuela, the San Blas Archipelago
Chapter 5 Great Escapes: The Trip Overland through Mexico and Central America
Chapter 6 “¿Dónde Está American Embassy?”: What the Travel Brochures Don't Tell You: Costa Rica, Panama, and the Galapagos
Chapter 7 The World’s Largest Espanse of Uninterrupted Ocean: Crossing the South Pacific to the Marquesas
Chapter 8 The Most Beautiful Islands in the World: The Societies
Chapter 9 Too Many Have Come before Us: The Cook Islands, the Samoas, and the Kingdom of Tonga
Chapter 10 Deep in the Doldrums: Crossing the Horse Latitudes to New Zeland
Chapter 11 Roll On, Deep and Dark Blue Ocean: The Mutiny and the Sofia's Final Passage
Chapter 12 Off the North Cape: The Storm
Chapter 13 Sinking: The Life Rafts
Chapter 14 Coming Home

Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

The reader can’t help but mourn the loss of the ship and the crew’s improvised lifestyle, as well as feel the joy, danger, and discovery that the author experienced and never forgot.”—Booklist

“The story takes readers through Hurricane Kendra, civil unrest in Latin America, the arrest of the entire crew (twice), dengue fever, and a near mutiny. . . . Sailing to the Far Horizon is also a travelogue of the type of adventures many boaters dream of: gatherings with the Cuna Indians in the Gulf of San Blas, discovering ancient tikis in the Marquesas.”—Soundings

“The human stories embedded in this book, poignant and painful, reveal the way that a ship boils people down to their essentials. You really get at the heart of who someone is on a voyage, even before you add the defining element of tragedy.”—Jim Delgado, Vancouver Maritime Museum and host of National Geographic Television’s The Sea Hunters

From the Publisher