Eric Wiberg
Round the World in the Wrong Season: A Nautical Coming-of-Age Memoir
language
(Island Books Feb. 1, 2010)
, 2 edition
Written between 1994 and 2009, is a memoir of global travel and an unfulfilled college crush. The book follows the narrator out of school and across the Pacific. At only 23 he has command of a 68-foot Burmese-teak ketch built in Scotland thrust upon him. The owner is on a voyage home to his death, and along the way they hire sailors twice the skipper's age. They makes it to New Zealand in a storm which sinks seven yachts, then spends months shearing sheep and writing a memoir. By the time the narrator makes a rendezvous with his college sweetheart (who has been teaching Thai students on the Burmese border), she seems to have all but forgotten him. This leads to a less than satisfactory denouement and puts at least one of them in the hospital.
The book includes extensive photographs and hand-drawn charts and a detailed bibliography. It is over 400 pages in length, perfect bound in cloth.