Pacific Lady: The First Woman to Sail Solo Across the World's Largest Ocean (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780803211384)

It was an age without GPS and the Internet, without high-tech monitoring and instantaneous reporting. And it was a time when women simply didn't do such things. None of this deterred Sharon Sites Adams. In June 1965 Adams made history as the first woman to sail solo from the mainland United States to Hawaii. Four years later, just as Neil Armstrong very publicly stepped onto the moon, the diminutive Adams, alone and unobserved, finally sighted Point Arguello, California, after seventy-four days sailing a thirty-one-foot ketch from Japan, across the violent and unpredictable Pacific. She was the first woman to do so, setting another world record.
Inspiring and exciting, Adams's memoir recounts the personal path leading to her historic achievements: a tomboy childhood in the Oregon high desert, an early marriage and painful divorce, and a second marriage that ended when her husband died of cancer. In the wake of his death and almost by accident, Adams discovered sailing. Six weeks after her first sailing lesson she bought a boat, and within eight months she set out to achieve her first world record. Pacific Lady recounts the inward journey that paralleled her sailing feats, as Adams drew on every scrap of courage and navigational skill she could muster to overcome the seasickness, exhaustion, and loneliness that marked her harrowing crossings. Purchase the audio edition.

Author: Sharon Sites Adams, Karen Coates
ISBN-10: 0803211384
ISBN-13: 9780803211384
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2008
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.96lbs
Size: 8.70h x 6.22w x 0.88d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2008 pg. 729
Booklist 09/15/2008 pg. 20