Sailing Away from Winter: A Cruise from Nova Scotia to Florida and Beyond.

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Proper sailors who have followed Silver Donald Cameron’s nautical wanderings in Hirondelle (his small, Lunenburg-built schooner) and Silversark should pour themselves a stiff tot of Mount Gay before taking this volume in hand. What, they may ask, is that towering hulk with picture windows doing on the cover? Surely, only a sailor-gone-to-seed would acquire a motorsailer, even in his declining years. The gloom deepens as Silver Donald affirms that most of the voyage from Cape Breton to the Bahamas and back was accomplished under power, the engine directed by the erstwhile sailor while comfortably located at an inside steering podium. On page 14, during the Strait of Canso leg of the voyage, he shamelessly describes his enjoyment of the creature comforts on offer. “In golf shirt and jeans, I sat in the skipper’s chair behind the windshield. With the GPS, computer, and radar in front of me, I steered through the tight channel as easily and comfortably as if I had been driving down a winding roadway in a car.”

All is not lost, however. Soon he is manipulating his literary organ in skillful fashion, as incidents, people, places, and things are assembled in suites of preludes, fugues, minuets, and jigs. No tale is long, but each is harmoniously incorporated into the score. We are entertained by periodic contrapuntal encounters with American immigration officers whose scripts seem to have been written by Gilbert and Sullivan. He introduces us to the past and present of storied port cities from Halifax, Canada, to Little Harbour, Bahamas. Repeatedly we hear the dirge-like ground bass of sailor- grousing: the plague of biting stable flies out of Gloucester, the curse of electrical and electronic malfunctions in an elaborate installation more suited to a NORAD command post than a small boat, repeated engine failure, motoring day in and day out down a dirty, shallow, and ill-maintained ditch, the antithesis of cruising as he had known it. All, he avers, is redeemed by the glory of Bahamian waters and the reaffirmation of his élan-vital.

Recommended. It may persuade some sailors that trucking is preferable to motoring down the ICW.