Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Dream Come True
Sailing Away From Winter
by Silver Donald Cameron
McClelland & Stewart
367 pages
Reviewed by Stephen Patrick Clare
Many Canadians dream of going south during the long, cold winter months. This time of year usually brings out the migratory instinct in all of us. Some of us spread our wings and fly off to Florida or the Caribbean or the Bahamas to bask in the golden glow of endless summer, while others only dream of surf, sand and sun while plowing through slushy streets on our way to work.
At the tender age of 67, longtime Atlantic Canadian author and columnist, Silver Don Cameron, had a novel idea. Why not set sail for warmer ports, pour himself on a beach and write a book about the journey? Why not indeed?
Accompanied by his wife, Marjorie Simmins, and their 15 year-old canine companion, Leo, Cameron bought and restored a 33 foot Nowegian motor-sailer, setting off for southern shores in the spring of 2004.
Departing from their homeport of D’Ecousse, Nova Scotia, the trio traversed the Eastern shoreline, with first stops along the rocky Atlantic Canadian seaboard before winding their way down the U.S coast.
En route, Cameron and crew encountered anything but smooth sailing. Aside from the usual trials of life at sea, including illness, inclement weather and ongoing mechanical issues (which Cameron attributes to “the trolls”), the trip was stalled by snafus with U.S Customs, several near collisions with other vessels, and a 3-foot tear in the boat’s hull after an incident with a stubborn wharf in Maine.
Doggedly, and against the growing concern of his shipmates, Cameron would not be deterred. With sturdiness and a steadfast resolve to stay afloat, the skipper pushed on, navigating his way through the many waterways, inlets and islands that dot the dash down south. Only prudent seamanship kept a sure course.
Taking shelter in different harbours each night, our captain goes ashore to meet and talk-up the locals, many of whom share his passion for seafaring. Stories are swapped, backs are slapped and toasts are made to their common passion.
Finally, a cold spell in Key West taps Cameron on the shoulder and he moves on, just a quick step ahead of winter. He and his mates then push southward off Fort Lauderdale, before enjoying “champagne cruising” into the crystal-blue waters of Hope Town.
After six months at sea, having traveled 3,000 miles, Cameron, his wife and BFD (beloved, faithful dog) Leo have earned their rest and plant their feet firmly into the white sands. Books and drinks in hand, the cold of Cape Breton is now but a distant memory.
Later, tinkering with a piano in a Bahamas bar, rum, crew and new found friends by his side, Cameron smiles and muses to himself “How did this happen?”
Of course, by that point, he may very well have been asking himself “How did this not happen sooner?”
Fluid, informative and entertaining, Sailing Away From Winter might be the perfect tonic for this time of the year. Cameron’s natural flair for storytelling makes for a great yarn, taking the reader along for a ride that is often good-humoured and always an adventure. And, as a journalist, he is careful to ensure that everything is anchored in fact.
With an enthusiasm that is as infectious as it is overwhelming, his wisdom of the water is well-offset by a humble disposition and a gracious respect for the ocean and her mighty ebb.
Observations on the natural beauty abound, with short and succinct paragraphs painting many wondrous portraits of still life and landscapes. Stirring passages on the open waters do well to recount the timeless relationship of man and sea.
Perhaps the work’s best words come to life come when Cameron befriends fellow sailors and boat-builders. It is in these memorable moments when we witness a unique vocation that, perhaps sadly, most of us will never know or possibly understand.
As such, Sailing Away From Winter might be overlooked as a “niche” read. Indeed, many of the technical terminology and “sailor-speak” is placed, frustratingly, just out of reach. The result is a story that sometimes stops and starts, weighed down with the mechanical necessities of a boy tinkering with his toy boat.
Still, this is perhaps Cameron’s finest work to date, and a good book for all to enjoy curled up on the couch, in front of the fireplace, dreaming of lands far-far away.
--
Winnipeg Free Press
Sunday, January 28th, 2007
Dream trip Interesting
4,800-km journey also a tough, tiring voyage
Sailing Away from Winter: A Cruise from Nova Scotia to Florida and Beyond
By Silver Donald Cameron
Douglas Gibson/M&S, 320 pages, $35
Reviewed by Margo Goodhand
CAN there be anything more appealing than a title like this in the middle of the Prairies in the middle of a dark cold spell in January? Shiver our timbers, indeed.
Maritime author Silver Donald Cameron dreamed of making this year-long, 4,800-km cruise to the Bahamas and back for 30 years before he finally realized, at the age of 67, he'd be foolish to put it off any longer. When he finally set sail July 21, 2004, he discovered he was charting a pretty familiar course. Hundreds of Canadians make the pilgrimage every year in search of summer. He sailed with his wife Marjorie Simmins and their trusty dog Leo the Wonder Whippet. The further south they got, however, the more they found themselves in a veritable flotilla of winter-weary Canucks.
Theirs is a particularly interesting journey because they take the Intracoastal Waterway, a winding, interconnected system of canals, inlets, bays, sounds and rivers that provide a sheltered route from Norfolk, Va., down the U.S. coast to the Florida Keys. You can travel 1,800 km through "The Big Ditch" and never enter the open sea, Cameron says, and you also pass through some of the most beautiful and historic cities in the U.S. -- Beaufort, Charleston, Savannah.
The only catch is the couple kicks off their voyage in Nova Scotia -- north of Canso, in fact. And they have about 1,600 km of open sea to cover before they get to Virginia. And they're travelling with the aforesaid 13-year-old wonder dog, which takes up a considerable amount of ink in this book because it is on its last legs, apparently, and one of their biggest concerns on board.
"Cruising books lead you to imagine idyllic sailing, exotic foods, snorkelling, snoozing, and sun-downers in the cockpit," writes Cameron, who has penned numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction, on Maritime subjects. "But few writers admit that such days are sandwiched between intense attention to the forecasts, the navigation and the diesel engine, and long trudges through small-town streets, carrying heavy burdens of food, dirty clothes, and motor oil."
Cameron can't be accused of glossing over the mundane realities of the trip. We read a lot about how hard it is to find a barber shop, Leo's early-morning pees (he has to disembark, for some reason, before he can go, which makes for some anxious times for dog and crew), their good meals, their bad pizzas, their search for an O-ring and other sundry boat parts. In fact, the detail sometimes bogs down the narrative.
But overall, this is interesting reading for any armchair traveller who is even remotely interested in the East Coast. Cameron meticulously chronicles each step of the way, vividly bringing to life, for example, the couple's exhilaration as they putt past the Statue of Liberty in New York's famous harbour. And you learn interesting tidbits about Chesapeake Bay (18,700 contorted kilometres of gorgeous and historic shoreline); about the "treacherous" New Jersey coastline (who knew?); about the balmy Bahamas and the enduring legacy of the American Civil War.
Cameron's adventures also underscore the danger attached to a trip like this. He runs into a wharf, dodges lobster traps, survives a hellish 24-hour storm, and suffers through a whole gamut of mechanical breakdowns. And he is an experienced sailor with a good vessel.
He's honest enough to admit at one point that he just wants to go home. "This was supposed to be fun," he tells his wife. "But it's just bloody hard work, frightening and miserable. Fuel problems. Electronic problems. Diabolical tides and contrary winds... The hell with it."
Luckily for us and him, she talks him out of it. And at the end, their friends remark on how much younger the couple looks -- tanned, fit, and trim. Even the dog is perkier.
"The voyage had changed us," Cameron writes. "Only now did I realize that I had, in a sense, sailed away from old age and gained a new sense of freedom."
Free Press deputy editor Margo Goodhand is still decades too young to contemplate such an arduous adventure.
Over and around the bounding main
DEREK LUNDY
Sailing Away From Winter: A Cruise from Nova Scotia to Florida and Beyond
By Silver Donald Cameron
McClelland & Stewart/Douglas Gibson, 367 pages, $34.99
Once upon a time, not long ago, the sea held profound meaning for us. It was a pre-eminently masculine realm, and men dreamed of the sea as a place of adventure, heroic struggle and redemption; like the battlefield, it was a proving ground of manhood. For women, the sea was something to cross to get somewhere else, or it was a malign and terrible power that snatched their men away from them. The sea was a common source of metaphor, and of vocabulary. Covering three-quarters of the Earth's surface -- planet ocean -- the sea made the world seem large, unpredictable, wild and dangerous.
That's all gone now. For most of us, the sea is a mere thing: We fly over it, dump in it, strip-mine it for protein or cruise its picturesque fringes in floating hotels with pointy ends. There are exceptions. Expendable men still work at sea -- fishermen and freighter crews -- mostly from countries of the "developing world." They still struggle and die there, although far fewer of them than in the past; they are not prone to romanticize their workplace.
And some inhabitants of the rich "developed world," who have time and money, and therefore choices, go to sea because it pleases them to do so. For those people, the sea retains some of its ancient meaning. They are bound to find there many of the things absent on land: simplicity, honour, adventure and the chance for ordinary men and women to find out who they are and what they're made of.
This seagoing impulse may be extreme: a non-stop circumnavigation through the great Southern Ocean, for example, or a round-the-world or single-handed transoceanic race. But there are many gentler, more homely versions of hunger for the sea. In Sailing Away From Winter, Nova Scotia writer Silver Donald Cameron describes one of them: a cruise from home on Cape Breton, down the east coast of the United States to Florida, and "beyond" -- as the subtitle has it -- to the nearby Bahamas, and to the revelations they disclose.
Cameron, his wife Marjorie and their dog, Leo the Wonder Whippet, a.k.a. the BFD ("brave and faithful dog"), buy an old, tubby Norwegian motor sailer, which they rename Magnus. They do what always has to be done with an older boat: fix or replace just about every damn thing aboard, usually more than once. In mid-summer, 2004, they head south, harbour-hopping along the coasts of Nova Scotia, New England, New York and New Jersey.
They can't stay out for more than 12 hours at a time because that marks the limit of the elderly Leo's bladder control -- he, like many dogs, refuses to pee while aboard, in spite of his owners' sweet inducements. The multi-species crew makes a hard right into Delaware Bay and on into the eight-river estuary of the Chesapeake. At Norfolk, Va., they enter the Intra Coastal Waterway.
Known as "the Ditch," the waterway is a labyrinthine network of sounds, rivers, creeks, cuts, swamps and canals that stretches all the way to the tip of Florida. The route is sheltered from the rowdy North Atlantic by the barrier islands of the coast. Boats can make their way south in safety and relative comfort, dodging late-season hurricanes and avoiding autumn gales. The crew can never relax, though. There are tides, currents, many lift bridges and, most daunting, shoals and shallow water everywhere. A good day is when a boat runs aground only a couple of times.
The helmsman must concentrate without let-up as long as the boat's in motion. Cameron learns the hard way, as do all sailors, how not to bash into docks or hit bottom, and how to follow narrow dredged channels in cross-winds, or cozy up to snarky or sullen lift-bridge operators. In many ways, it's easier on the open ocean, even in bad weather: You just point the boat in the right direction and try not to be too afraid.
Magnus and his human-doggy crew make it all the way to Fort Lauderdale. From there, they must cross the 50-mile-wide Strait of Florida to get to the idyllic Abacos, in the northern Bahamas. The strait can be a bad stretch of water if strong winds blow against the fast, north-setting Gulf Stream, but the voyagers wait for a good weather window, and they make the dash across. The islands fulfill their promise of slow peace and gentle weather.
Cameron, a sailor in his local waters for 30 years, has always dreamed of making such a voyage. In his late sixties, he thinks: Better do it now. It's seductive and stirring for weekend sailors when, finally, they have the chance to just keep going, and not turn back and head home after a few hours or a couple of weeks. The sense of freedom, of possibility, rejuvenates all three souls aboard Magnus. "South, south, south" is Cameron's mantra as winter fills in behind them.
This is a well-written, plain-told, day-by-day account of getting a small boat from one place to another. Cameron is a veteran writer and knows how to lace his story with a little history, interesting characters, with whimsy and a dose of good old self-deprecating Canadian humour. A reader might wish for more drama, or for some sea-going crises surmounted or trials endured. But for a sailor, to make a voyage without mishap or trauma is the whole idea. Cameron's book about the mellow completion of his long-delayed dream of the sea is a quiet pleasure to read.
Derek Lundy is the author of Godforsaken Sea. His latest book, The Bloody Red Hand: A Journey Through Truth, Myth, and Terror in Northern Ireland, has just been published in paperback.
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