Seamanship

Thoughts from a small boat in a big sea.

Early in the year, Adam Nicolson decided to leave his comfy life at home on a Sussex farm and go for an adventure. Equipped with the Auk, a 42-foot wooden ketch, and a friend who at least knew how to sail, he set off up the Atlantic coasts of the British Isles: Cornwall to Scilly, over to Pembrokeshire and the west of Ireland, to the Hebrides and its offliers, St Kilda and North Rona, before heading on to Orkney, and finally to the Faroes, a 200-mile leap out into the autumn winds of the North Atlantic.

But the book is not just a travel journal. Adam Nicolson writes of his own yearnings for the sea and for wide open spaces. His year is strung between the competing claims of leaving and belonging, of thinking that no life could be more exhilarating than battling a big gale driving in out of the Atlantic and of wanting to be back, in harbour, safe, still and protected. Running throughout the book is a dialogue in the author himself between the attractions of home and not home, the certainties of what you know and the seductions of what you don't.

Reflective and poetic, treating the sea less as a playground than as another intriguing and unknown landscape on our doorstep, Man at Sea is nevertheless full of rich experience. It is a story passionately engaged with the beauty and marvels of the wild Atlantic coast, but is also a self-portrait of a man in the middle of his life who is determined to find out what it's all for.