Seaworthy: A Swordboat Captain Returns To The Sea Download Free (EPUB, PDF)
America's only female swordfish boat captain returns with this long- awaited follow-up to the bestselling The Hungry Ocean. After the exploits recounted in The Perfect Storm and The Hungry Ocean that made her a sensation, Linda Greenlaw took a ten- year hiatus from blue-water fishing. When an old friend offered her a captaincy on his swordboat, Greenlaw ditched her mounting bills and headed for the sea. Full of adventure and thought-provoking reflection, Seaworthy recounts her return to the beautiful and deadly Grand Banks -from the nuances of reading weather and the complexities of longline fishing to the surprise of landing in jail for crossing into Canadian waters. The result is both a wild ride and a memorable look at one woman's struggle to define her own limits.
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (June 28, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143119567
ISBN-13: 978-0143119562
Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.7 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #547,225 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #95 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Natural Resources > Fisheries & Aquaculture #772 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Oceans & Seas #2883 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Travelers & Explorers
By age 47 Linda Greenlaw had led a life that by any counts would seem like two lifetimes to the average person. Average is something Greenlaw is not. Made the only female captain of a swordfishing boat at age 24, she retains that status and has earned the accolade from Sebastian Junger, author of THE PERFECT STORM, in which she is featured as "one of the best captains, period, on the entire east coast." She was 29 in 1991 as she and her crew set out for the Grand Banks in the face of one of the deadliest winter storms in history that caught her and her companion boats in the deadly North Atlantic. She never could have dreamed that nearly 20 years later, she would find herself in a completely different kind of adventure --- one of a legal nature --- when she hit the sea.Greenlaw had continued deep water fishing until 1997, but the scarcity of swordfish in the North Atlantic forced fishermen to seek alternative income sources, so she bought her own boat and turned to lobstering. This brought about a more land-based life, so she purchased a home off the coast of Maine on tiny Isle au Haut and took a foster daughter under her wing. In her spare time she wrote five books, two of them hitting the New York Times bestseller lists. Between setting and hauling lobster traps and family responsibilities, she traveled on book tours and made personal appearances. After 10 years, she began to hear the siren call of deep water fishing as newly minted rules governing the once free-for-all deep water fishing industry brought about a resurgence of the Atlantic swordfish population.
I thought this an awful book. Billed as an adventure story, there is precious little adventure in it.After a ten year hiatus from swordfishing, Linda Greenlaw is offered the command of Seahawk, a creaky old vessel with lots of problems. She assembles a crew (who she can't stop gushing over) and spends a week getting Seahawk ready, whereupon she sets sail for the Grand Banks in hopes of catching enough swordfish to make a profit. Along the way, she and her crew encounter a variety of equipment failures and somehow end up fishing illegally in Canadian waters, resulting in Ms. Greenlaw's arrest and brief incarceration. She and her crew finally reach the Grand Banks, fish, catch some, and then return home on the owner's orders to attempt to sell their catch for top dollar. The gambit doesn't work and no one makes any money.The story certainly isn't as interesting as, say, Moby Dick or 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. But told well, it might have made a solid magazine piece. Instead Ms. Greenlaw and her publisher chose to present it as a 250-page book filled with very little real conflict, but lots of repetition, tortured imagery, technical explanation so convoluted and jargon-filled as to be almost meaningless, purple prose, bad grammar and worst of all, page after page of Ms. Greenlaw's self-congratulation, -explanation, and -aggrandizement. Indeed, Ms. Greenlaw spends far more time describing how she felt about the events that took place than she does describing the events themselves. That's fine if you're sitting around the kitchen table shooting the breeze with an old friend you've known for years. But it hardly belongs in a book being offered to the public as a tale of adventure.And much of the writing is just plain bad.
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