"The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea"
By Mary South
HarperCollins, $23.95
Mary South was at sea. Or, to be more precise, Mary South felt that without the sea, she'd be at sea. Smack in the middle of her 40s, marooned in a stone cabin in the landlocked woods of Pennsylvania, and adrift in a successful but soulless publishing job, South woke up one day and decided that the open ocean was the only cure for her crushing ennui. It was a dream that began in the pages of magazines -- stacks on her coffee table that gradually grew, Professional Mariner Magazine edging out the New York Review of Books, and Motorboating replacing House and Garden -- but came alive when South quit her job, sold her house and her belongings, and bought a trawler she christened the Bossanova. The water was waiting. Her rig was waiting. All she had to do was learn how to pilot it.
In "The Cure For Anything Is Salt Water," a new memoir of her first season at sea, South winningly recounts how -- as in life -- the real adventures began with her education. With just one stuffed duffel bag and two Jack Russell terriers in tow, she drives to Florida and enrolls in a nine-week crash course at the Chapman School of Seamanship in West Palm Beach. Though the omens are not always auspicious -- South flunks her first test and has trouble finding a single marine insurer to cover her -- she stays the course. Until soon enough, with John, her classmate and odd-couple first mate at her side, South steers the Bossanova out of its slip, into the Intracoastal Waterway, and onto its maiden voyage.
The 1,500 mile journey from Florida to Maine is part dream and part nightmare, made up of gnarled mangrove islands, empty, shimmering seas, salt-crusted marinas, and spectacular and terrifying storms. But even when her first mate is retching over the starboard, South never loses her breezy infatuation with her boat, or her wonderment at the new life she's been given. So even if your idea of the open waters is a swim-up bar at the Ritz Carlton, South's uncluttered style and hopeful prose is charming enough to make you happy to simply float peacefully along in its wake.
-- Sarah Karnasiewicz
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