Rowing for My Life

Two Oceans, Two Lives, One Journey

“A thoughtful memoir . . . Experienced sailors and thrill seekers will especially enjoy the details of the ocean adventures” (Booklist).
 
Kathleen Saville and her husband, Curt, had recently gotten married and were settling down in a small town in New York—when Kathleen started to realize that maybe they weren’t quite ready to settle down.
 
The year before, she and Curt had retraced Henry David Thoreau’s canoe journey through the Maine Woods, and both were veteran rowers. Inspired, she suggested that they row across the Atlantic Ocean. Returning to her hometown, living on a shoestring, they built their own twenty-five-foot ocean rowboat. They set out from Morocco and, tested by adverse currents, gales, and their own inexperience, accomplished the near impossible.
 
Three years later, while they attempted to row across the Pacific, Curt was washed overboard and lost their sextant—their only means of navigation. Now, besides confronting fatigue, storms, sharks, and deadly reefs, they had to find a way to avoid becoming lost at sea and succumbing to starvation. Their ordeal in completing their crossing exposed the fissures in their marriage—and in this and subsequent adventures, Kathleen was forced to confront the difference between courage and foolhardiness.
 
Suspenseful, heartbreaking, and ultimately triumphant, her story of an unraveling marriage is also the account of finding her true self amid the life-and-death challenges at sea.
 
“Beyond the rowing is a remarkably frank and compelling portrayal of a marriage between two complex people, and writing that is often sublime.” —Webb Chiles, author and world-record-holding solo sailor