Imagine sailing alone for 14 weeks in freezing temperatures aboard
a 32-foot sailboat. Imagine your boat capsizing three times, and
losing your mast and rigging. And imagine doing all this without
modern electronic navigational tools like the Global Positioning
System. ICE BIRD: The Classic Story of the First Single-handed
Voyage to Antarctica chronicles the author's 1972 trip from
Australia to Antarctica aboard the sailboat ICE BIRD. Along the
way, David Lewis sank into unbelievable despair as his small boat
lost its mast, and he suffered frostbite and broken ribs.
Eventually, he lost the use of his radio and engine, and was forced
to hand-steer the boat. Though it was summer in the Southern
Hemisphere, it snowed daily. Lewis faced gale-force winds and huge
waves as he sailed 3,500 miles in his jury-rigged sailboat. Once I
started reading this book, I could not put it down. It tells the
wonderful, true adventure of a man forced to overcome serious
injury, damage to his boat and unbelievable stress as he captained
his small craft more than halfway around the world at 60 degrees
south latitude. If you enjoy sailing, read Lewis's adventure. You
won't be able to put it down.
*The Ensign*
On paper, David Lewis's pioneering solo voyage from Sydney to
Antarctica in 1972 doesn't sound like much, compared to the myriad
of epic, sea-going adventures we're used to nowadays. But just a
few pages into this gripping paperback, it's clear his horrific 23
weeks surviving towering waves, driving snow and a ceaseless,
storm-force battering in the Southern Ocean can claim a proud place
in the pantheon of nautical legend. No radio contact with home,
three terrifying capsizes, two dismastings and frostbite left the
middle-aged former doctor in mortal dread of his wild surrounds and
saw him cowering inside the cabin for days on end. Lewis describes
his lonely voyage in vivid prose and makes no bones about his
navigational and practical mistakes along the way, or the
conviction that gripped him for weeks after his dismasting that he
would die on board. Lewis' disheveled arrival under jury-rig in the
Royal Cape Yacht Club marina marks the end of an awesome tale as
much a page-turner today as it would have been when it was first
published 30 years ago.
*The Dorset Echo*
There can't be many people who, when leaving school, inform their
headmaster that they are making the 450 mile trip home in a canoe.
While David Lewis's first epic voyage at the age of 17 may have
left him feeling a little flat with the anticlimax, his marathon
voyage to Antarctica in 1972 was a first for single-handed yachts.
A welcome reprint, therefore, which thriller writer Hammond Innes
described as the greatest small boat voyage into ice since
Shackleton's. Although Lewis acknowledges that many sailors would
follow him to Antarctica in faster and smaller craft, he saw his
role as a trailblazer and the trip as a means of coming to know
himself as he really was. Where better to find out one's strengths
and weaknesses than being left without any form of outside support
in one of the harshest environments known to man? In doing his
research before making the trip, background information provided
him with the odd sleepless night after reading of 100 ft waves. His
previous yacht having sunk, he was also without essential
equipment, not to mention money to buy a replacement craft. Media
interest in the venture being strong, he admits in his book that he
had to be downright dishonest in some of the things he told
journalists, who did not realize, in the late stages of planning
the venture, that he was still without a yacht. Frantic activity
secured Lewis a yacht, a 32 ft steel sloop designed by Dick Taylor
of Sydney.
*Lloyd's List*
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