A Year in a Yawl

Fourteen-year-old Kenneth Ransom has a dream: to build his own boat and see the world. With his friends Clyde, Frank, and Arthur, he sets to work in a New England boatyard, sawing, planing, and hammering until a thirty-foot yawl takes shape beneath their hands. They name her the Fantail. When they finally slip her mooring and point her bow toward open water, they leave behind everything familiar, school, family, the familiar streets of home, and embrace the uncertain, glittering horizon ahead. Sailing the eastern coastline from New York to Florida and back, through storm-chopped bays and still morning harbors, the boys encounter fog thick as wool, near-shipwrecks, and the quiet company of lighthouse keepers and dockhands who share their meals and stories. They learn to read the wind, to trust each other completely, and to find home in the rocking cradle of the deck. Written in 1912, when a boy could still disappear into an adventure for a year and return forever changed, this is a story about the extraordinary courage it takes to simply go, and the even greater courage to keep going when the coast fades from view.