Tania Aebi

OK, so it's not Great Literature, but it's great life. This account of Tania Aebi's solo voyage around the world is relentlessly honest and if anything benefits by its plainspoken and somewhat taciturn manner. I loved it. Next year I circumnavigate Lake Superior!

Considering the total lack of proper preparation, it is amazing that she survived even her first passage. But the, considering her disfunctional parents, it is almost as amazing that she survived to set off. Not a bad book, but the whole situation was rather surreal. Most of her problems were brought on by shear carelessness. I kept wincing at the way things were not properly stowed, use of breakable containers, problems with the boat that a short shakedown cruise would have found and solved show more before getting caught by them in the middle of the ocean ... show less

I just so happened to read this book on a vacation to Chub Cay Bahamas fishing. It was a great surrounding for me to read this book. A well written story, better then most, and it draws you in making you want to buy a sailboat, point it in a general direction, rase the main, and disappear where ever the wind will take you.

Its does has deeper story of Tania Aebi discovering herself too.

The author is frighteningly immature and unprepared, but she is after all still a teenager. She benefits from a lot of luck, but impressively sets her sights on an around-the-world voyage, and goes for it. Quite an experience! The writing is nothing special, though.

> Out of the past two and a half years, I had spent 360 days alone at sea, pressing ever westward, ever homeward. This final landfall would close the circle

> To every problem there is a solution. This time it was the sextant. I show more had been using the plastic one that had been aboard my father’s boat, Pathfinder. Through the years the plastic must have warped because the angles I was getting between the sun and horizon were slightly off. An unaligned sextant will get you nowhere. Luckily, in the bottom of one of my lockers lived an excellent aluminum Freiberger sextant.

> Men and women in colorful costumes sang religious songs and danced in front of a veranda where the king and his entourage sat holding court. The dancers had petroleum jelly smeared all over their arms and shoulders, and onlookers stuck paper money on their favorites, in this way making a collection for a new building.

> There were two general stores with the inevitable Sao crackers and Laughing Cow cheese with the wedges fitting into the familiar round box. Ever since Tahiti, this had become my standard sea fare, as it was always the cheapest and easiest to prepare. show less