Bad days sailing, told with aristocratic though strangely appealing understatement, by Chiles (The Ocean Waits, 1984). "Most people most of the time seek the safety and stability necessary to perpetuate the species, but the species also needs a few originals,'' says Chiles, casting his lot with the latter. For him that meant sailing around the globe a few times and running into some particularly rude situations that he subsequently wrote about for various sailing publications. "I am best known for those tales of survival,'' and so as not to disappoint his readers, he musters here a good handful of scary encounters while single-handedly sailing Egregious, Chidiock Tichborne, and Resurgam. Not one for melodrama (readers will more likely sense that he is downplaying the terrifying qualities of his adventures), Chiles offers a low-key account of being pitchpoled in the Southern Ocean, swamping his open-decked yawl, and drifting for two weeks to the New Hebrides. Then there was that nasty bit of wind, so outrageous it actually erased the waves and flattened the sea. And that near-mincing upon a group of sea rocks called the Noises, and those irritating spells of madness, "if by madness one means the acceptance as normal of conditions that are far from acceptable,'' like being gale-slammed in a small boat, which is as common for Chiles as paring his fingernails. How about being dropped in the Gulf Stream after the sinking of Resurgam, swimming and floating for 26 hours and 125 miles, the salt water eating his throat and eyes, before rescue? "The day should have been as hard as it was,'' he points out. Of course. Chiles is such a winsome and sincere antique, when he says something like "sail on, Egregious, sail on,'' it comes across as endearing rather than embarrassing. Only the most cynical wouldn't wish Chiles the best and take pleasure in his capers: sail on, sailor, sail on. (maps, not seen)
