The Open Boat: Across the Pacific

From the cover of the original hardcover

This is the story of possibly the greatest open boat voyage of all time.

The first part of what will be a trilogy if the author survives to complete the future legs of his voyage, it is the gripping narrative of a 7,000 mile voyage, alone, across the Pacific in an open, unballasted, eighteen foot yawl weighing only 850 pounds. The author tells of surviving fifty knot gales, two capsizes, two weeks adrift in a rubber raft, and shipwreck on an island in the New Hebrides.

Along the way, he landed on exotic islands where adventures, both romantic and unromantic, befell the Marquesas, where he found the valley that moved Melville to write of the glamorous Fayaway in TYPEE; beautiful but crowded Tahiti; Bora-Bora; Pago-Pago; Fiji; and the New Hebrides, where the natives of Emae Island saved his craft so that his voyage may go on.

Webb Chiles's OPEN BOAT takes its place among a select few books about the sea that have captured the imagination of the landlocked as well as the seafaring.