SEVENTY-ONE days of blue SOLITUDE

Here is a terrific book that's a blend of PAPILLON and ANGELA?S ASHES, an astonishing story of a solo ocean voyage of seventy one days from Puerto Rico to the Slovenian Adriatic by resourceful and brilliant sailor and chronicler of the sea, Reinhard Brecko. I mfirst read this work while it was in manuscript, a nautical samizdat exchanged and shared from sailor to sailor along the Atlantic coast from Corunna to Cork Harbour. Just before Christmas 2016 an oceaqn-going sailor from Cork Habour eho regularly runs yachts for friends on the Cork-Coruna-Gran Canaria sea route first told me about this Slovenian solo Atlantic sailor, who'd written a terrific book about his adventures, a log of his solo Atlantic voyage combined with a memoir of his escape from Communist Yugoalavia in an inflatable dinhy in the early 1960's, and his complicated love-life in the West. I was handed the samizdat and absolutely thrilled as the story unfolded,SEVENTY ONE DAYS OF BLUE SOLITUDE is the story of a solo ocean voyage from Marina de Salinas, Puerto Rico, to the littlr Bay of Piran in Adriatic Slovenia. Reinhard and his fish-catching tabby cat, Olivia, survived an extraordinary journey. It is much more than the mere description of the ocean voyage through tropical storms, Atlantic swells and hurricanes, saving ill sea turtles and being chased by pirates off the coast of Africa and being robbed by beautiful young lovers in the ports of Azores and Cadiz. As the voyage goes on day after day, with different technical problems, Reinhard recalls his extraordinary escape from Communist Yugoslavia, rowing with his teenage companion in his inflatable dinghy all the way to the Italian coast, half-starved, frightened, but full of the hopes of a Communist-era refugee in the 1960s. The description of European borderlands, guards, secret police and machine-gun hazards, is a stark reminder of the Europe we left behind. it is a world of calculations, endurance and relentless masculinities, all of wich have left their mark on the character of Reinhard Brecko. The book pulses with life and purpose and an extraordinary understanding of the solitary power of the ocean. It is a book, really, for anyone who'se ever felt the impulse to escape, to be alone, to begin again. I'm told the author now lives a quiet life on his boat down in Gran nCanaria, but that he is still a lively, charismatic, really amazing chatacter. If you read no other book of the sea between now and Christmas, you must read this one: a pearl, a sea-turtle, a flying-fish among memoirs of the sea.