All Hands on Deck: A Modern-Day High Seas Adventure to the Far Side of the World

“I always knew sailing Rose to California was a special, once in a lifetime kind of experience. But it took me two decades to truly understand what I got out of it,” recollects shipwright Sofrin in this nostalgic account of sailing a replica of an 18th-century British warship from Rhode Island to California in 2002. Hired as a deck hand, 21-year-old Sofrin and his fellow crew members piloted the Rose down the Atlantic seaboard, through the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific coast to San Diego, where it would be used in the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. From patching a leaky hull and climbing 10 stories up to secure a broken section of the mainmast, the 30-person crew had to learn the “forgotten skills” of sailing an 18th-century “tall ship” on the fly. Sofrin intersperses details of life aboard the Rose with tidbits of tall ship history and enlightening commentary on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, on which the film was based. High-spirited and finely detailed, this adventure tale will delight sailors of all stripes. Photos. Agent: Max Sinsheimer, Sinsheimer Literary. (Apr.)