Maiden Voyage by Tania Aebi
I had never heard of this sailing classic until David Strasburger told me about it at, appropriately enough, the end-of-summer faculty staff party just before Labor Day. I knew I should be combing through Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind to find quiz questions to stump my seniors, but this was the perfect Labor Day weekend read.
Tania is an eighteen-year-old bike messenger hacking around New York and, her Swiss-German father thinks,going nowhere with her life. He issues her a challenge: I’ll buy a sailboat, and you will sail it around the world, maybe break a world record, and write about your experiences for Cruising World.
Tania accepts the challenge, outfits her trusty little (26-foot) vessel Varuna, who will safely get her around the ocean (we know this, because she lived to tell the tale and write the book!), even though in chapter after chapter we deal with Varuna’s once again broken down engine. This book is honest, exciting, moving, well written. Tania endures crazy gales and typhoons, accidents, harrowing moments at the mercy of the most ferocious elements, tedium, confusion and heartache. There are also times of transcendent beauty and even bliss. She lets us into all of it; her prose style is lively and real.
I would recommend Maiden Voyage as a real-life coming of age story, a love story (first Luc, then Olivier), a story of family dysfunction, and a big adventure. The sailing details are also fantastic– her description of finally learning how to do celestial navigation is both funny and serious; again, she is so completely and disarmingly honest. At the beginning she is way, way off and by the end, she is a complete pro. There you go. A whole lot of growing up, and I so admire what she did and the spirit with which she pulled it off. I would not have the guts.
