READING THE GLASS

The challenges of life at sea.

Rappaport, who has been a sea captain since 1992 and teaches at the Maine Maritime Academy, makes his book debut with vibrant accounts of sailing around the world. Central to his spirited, informative narrative is weather. “Like pilots, roofers, and mountain climbers,” he writes, “mariners are by default obsessed with the weather, immersed in it as part of their daily calculus.” Aboard the tall ships he helms to train students, weather updates come in the form of “nonstop streams of data from satellites, weather buoys, and balloons,” but all these technological supports do not substitute for “a live person sending information about pressure and wind velocity at a specific location.” Rappaport explains the deft choreography of daily life on a ship as well as the myriad variables that affect a journey. “The world’s great sailing routes,” he observes, “are less paved highways than patterns of occasional convenience, spun from the overall chaos of the atmosphere.” He provides clear explanations of technical terms, some familiar (trade winds, El Niño, jet stream) and some likely to be new to land-bound readers, such as cold tongue, loop currents, bora and mistral winds, and the difference between sea smoke and summer fog. The author also offers a taxonomy of clouds, sails, and instruments, and he is equally informative about the development of weather reporting and the history of sailing. His voyages have taken him to the South Pacific, Greenland, New Zealand, and Mediterranean ports, and he has braved the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties, a “subantarctic expanse of frigid westerly winds” named for the latitudes they occupy. The success of any voyage, Rappaport admits, depends on knowledge, preparation, meticulous attention to detail, and luck. “For the most part,” he writes, “real tales of heavy weather involve simple endurance—low-grade misery, a constant queasy vigilance in anticipation of some cascading mishap.”

Fascinating journeys with an expert guide.