A charming early memoir of midlife with the bestselling author of Mayflower and In the Heart of the Sea, recounting his attempt to recapture a national sailing championship he’d won at twenty-two.

‘There had been something elemental and everything consuming about a Sunfish. Nothing could compare towards the exhilaration of a close race in a real blow–the wind howling and spray flying as my Sunfish and I punched through the waves to the finish.’

In the planting season of 1992 (eight years before the publication of about Second Wind: A Sunfish Sailor, an Island, and the Voyage That Brought a family group Jointly In the Heart of the Sea), Nat Philbrick was in his late thirties, coping with his family on Nantucket, feeling stranded and desiring the thrill of victory of the national sailing championship he previously gained fifteen years earlier. Was it a midlife problems? It was certainly a watershed for the journalist-turned-stay-at-home father, who impulsively made a decision to throw his hat in to the band, or water, again. With the bemused approval of his wife and children, Philbrick utilized the off-season over the island as his solitary teaching ground, sailing his small Sunfish to its remotest corners, exceptional haunting beauty of its tidal creeks, inlets, and wave battered sand bars. On ponds, bays, rivers, and finally in the championship on the lake in the heartland of America, he sailed through storms and memories, racing for the reward, but obtaining something unexpected about himself rather.

A warm, funny, and modest book on the subject of the journey house for one sailor and his family.