Small Craft Advisory

By Louis D. Rubin Jr.

Book Overview

Small Craft Advisory is an enchanting book about Louis Rubin's obsession with boats and his years of often hilarious boating adventures. When Louis Rubin was thirteen, he built a leaky little boat and paddled it out to the edge of the ship channel in Charleston, South Carolina, where he felt the inexorable pull of the water. Fifty years and dozens of boats later--sailboats, powerboats, inboards and outboards--the pull is as strong as ever. In the tradition established by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Herman Melville, distinguished author and scholar Louis Rubin explores man's longtime passion for boats. He examines the compulsion that has prompted him and hundreds of thousands of other non-nautical persons to spend so much time, and no small portion of their incomes, on watercraft that they can use only infrequently. As his new boat (a cabin cruiser made of wood on a workboat hull) is being built, Rubin tells of his past boats and numerous boating disasters and draws a poignant comparison between his two passions: watercraft and the craft of writing. Anyone who has ever bought and owned a boat--or wondered why people are obsessed by them--will love this amusing, evocative, beautifully crafted memoir by an inveterate boat-owner.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871135337
• ISBN13: 9780871135339
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 394 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful and inspiring tale

It's easy to love this book, whether you're even a casual boater or a landlubber. Mr. Rubin gives some great insights into his life and the reasons why one makes the choices they make. I read the opening about him building the small boat as a child to my wife, who absolutely was entranced by the images. Even though I live near one of the Great Lakes instead of the Atlantic Ocean, "messing about in boats" is one of the greatest joys in life, which the author has aptly demonstrated in this book.

A rambling memoir of the pains and perils of owning a boat

I picked up Rubin's little classic at a remainder table, thinking to peruse it when I ran out of other reading material. Shame on me. This is an intensly personal and delightful little book. Not for the non nautical, neither is it for the practical. If I could I would drop Mr. Rubin a short note with one word. "Thanks."J.A.Schroeder Seattle, WA