2.5 stars
The 2.5 Stars results from three stars given to two of the stories. Did not finish, because it got monotonous after a while. I really didn't enjoy the stories about the races. The best stories were "Dark Wind," and the other was "Kon Tiki Across the Pacific by Raft."
The terms from sailing are repetitious and confusing, and my interest was not piqued enough to keep looking up these nautical terms. By and large, the authors struck me as being entitled humans, playing with their boat toys.
In "Dark Wind," the remarks about his wife's body were rather sickening. The cruelty to the sea animals was sickening, as well, so I couldn't feel that sorry for the dude, responsible as he was for his wife's death.

Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea STEVEN CALLAHAN
"I’ll stir a tin of rabbit I’ve saved into a curry, ignoring the French superstition that even the slightest mention of lapin assures a crew the most wretched luck."
Looks like karma bit you. Haha.

3 stars
DARK WIND A Survivor’s Tale of Love and Loss GORDON CHAPLIN
"Almost shyly she stepped out of her shorts. Still in her T-shirt, she reached through the wheelhouse window for a barrette. When I begged her not to pin up her hair, she put the clip back and pulled the jersey over her head. Her breasts always surprised me. They looked like Marilyn Monroe’s—cheerleader, Hollywood, 1950s breasts."
"He handed Susan a cardboard box and opened the lid to reveal a giant crab. “Him good eat. Welcome to Wotho.” The crab lived on coconuts, husked with its powerful claws. It had a large soft body, almost like a hermit crab’s without the shell. That evening we poached it carefully, and the meat had a tender coconut flavor. It was heavenly."
"I hadn’t realized that shells in some cultures are considered bad talismans. But when I found my shell, glowing eerily in the darkness of its crevice, I’d felt an odd current that was not the joy of discovery."
"We let the animal in my shell gradually die and deliquesce until it could be washed out in salt water. The smell was so horrendous that we tried a different approach when she found hers, boiling it briefly to kill and harden the animal and then picking it out with a fishhook."

CLOSE TO THE WIND PETE GOSS
"Four days after the rescue Raphaël proposed by fax to his girlfriend Virginie on her birthday. I think that perhaps his close brush with death on the deck of Algimouss made him realise what was important in his life. She faxed back her acceptance and suggested that I be best man."
"His boat was surfing on waves as high as a sixty-foot, six-storey building. It was too dangerous on deck and he was sheltering down below and trying to control the headlong rush of Algimouss with his autopilot. It was hopeless. He was trapped inside the upturned hull of Algimouss after being capsized by a huge wave which crashed across the boat, flipping it on its side and turning it upside down."

KON-TIKI Across the Pacific by Raft THOR HEYERDAHL
"We had found it a hard job to cut the dolphin in two with knives, but in a fraction of a second the shark, moving its triangular saw teeth quickly sideways, had chopped off the backbone and everything else like a sausage machine."
"Whence had the Polynesians obtained their vast astronomical knowledge and their calendar, which was calculated with astonishing thoroughness? Certainly not from Melanesian or Malayan peoples to the westward. But the same old vanished civilized race, the “white and bearded men,” who had taught Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas their amazing culture in America, had evolved a curiously similar calendar and a similar astronomical knowledge which Europe in those times could not match."




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