Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Awesome book and awesome story of courage, the desire for adventure while also thinking of the "normal life" back home, how friendship can be found (or never really found (like with Manuel) and also complete craziness ("but not stupidity"). David Mercy writes much like the reader is there. The closest comparison I have read to this book would be "Into Thin Air". The major difference of course is Jon Krakauer had some experience climbing mountains, and David Mercy had no sailing experience and that in itself is incredible. David went from shore to manning the wheel in a force-12 storm in the Drake Passage. I wonder how many people can claim their first experience sailing is crossing the Drake Passage.
When I finished this book I thought of how everything that happened to the crew seemed to time itself perfectly to the final end. I especially have to respect David Mercy for not abandoning Jarle when he could have like Manuel did. Had he done so there would likely never have been this incredible story and maybe no good ending that the world would know of. When David had the opportunity to abandon Jarle and stay in the warmth and safety of the cruise ship I thought of the film "The Red Tent"-when Umberto Nobile left on a rescue plane ahead of all the other survivors during the failed 1928 airship expedition to the North Pole and how he had to live with his decision in later years.
My only complaint was there were no photographs (aside from the cover sleeve). They have a site on the internet (the Wild Vikings), but it doesn't tell much of the story, but it appears they have been on another expedition recently.
I can't stop reading about small sailboats and thinking of the places I could go since I finished this book.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Berserk: My Voyage to the Antarctic in a Twenty-Seven-Foot Sailboat
In 1998, David Mercy had spent the better part of a year traveling through South America when he reached Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, the southernmost tip of the continent. As a world traveler, the only continent he had not yet visited-Antarctica-beckoned from across the treacherous waters of the Roaring Forties, an infamous graveyard for ships. Mercy searched a local port for passage, but ships booked for scientific expeditions would not take him, and the tourist cruises didn't appeal to his sensibilities or his pocketbook. He almost gave up when word came from the docks. The old salts were talking about a nineteen-year-old Norwegian who was rigging his twenty-seven-foot fiberglass sailboat for an adventure quite beyond the pale. There in the harbor lay the little boat, its name crudely inscribed on the hull with short lengths of black electrical tape: Berserk.A young Argentine who had walked out of central casting-and who had also walked out on his wife of one week-rounded out the boat's complement. As the three greenhorn sailors set sail, they could only vaguely apprehend the tumultuous storms, mishaps, and emergencies that loomed before them like the craggy outline of the world's most uninhabitable continent. Author David Mercy describes what it is like to withstand heaving seas and crushing waves for days on end, seasickness, and the first sight of the treacherous "growlers" or baby icebergs. For a while the young Argentine mutinied and refused to come out of the cabin. Subsisting mainly on candy bars and peeping owlishly from belowdecks, his seasick descent into madness hampers their ability to control the boat in dangerous conditions. But there are also adventures with elephant seals sunning themselves on the banks of Antarctica, vast ice caves, and whaling camps populated by antisocial miscreants. Returning was quite another matter, an experience reminiscent of Shackleton's odyssey. Throughout the voyage, Mercy took videotape of what would become an immensely successful Norwegian documentary, and took notes for this humorous and well-drawn yarn. For adventure lovers, as Melville once wrote, "this is what ye shipped for, men!"
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