Peter Brennan loves sailing. That love bursts from just about every page of his book, Fun with Sailboats. Even when the race is lost, or the wind has died, Brennan savors sailing.
He started young, sailing an 11-foot Styrofoam boat his dad obtained by redeeming cigarette carton tops. He eventually doubled his boat size, traveling on a 22-foot sailboat in Florida. Brennan sailed a 30-foot sailboat in New York before giving in to the lure of sailing tall ships and racing vessels as part of their crews.
He volunteered on a Canadian schooner, Mist of Avalon, the Irish tall ship Asgard II, and the Dutch ship, Thalassa. His adventures include crewing on races with finishes in 
Mexico, Cuba, and Ireland.
I’m not proficient in sailboat terminology. I know heeling and tacking, but I’m lost at sea when a sail-centric author focuses on the topsail, t’gallant, the mainsail, the jib, and a lot of other terms I’ve never grasped. Brennan never casts a reader like me adrift — he mentions the sails in context but then describes the work of a crew, the luck it takes to have the wind blowing in the direction you want to go, and the sights and sounds of the shore that sooth sailors when their luck runs out.
Brennan’s travels at sea and on land are captured in photos throughout the book. He mentions just enough history of far-off places to send me to research more. However, Fun with Sailboats really isn’t a travelogue any more than it’s a how-to manual on sailboat crewing. It’s mainly a love letter to a life lived with one foot on land and another on the deck of a sometimes becalmed and occasionally roiling vessel.
When the wind and seas are right, Brennan relishes sailing. When they are not, he takes delight in the world he gets the chance to see by sailing. No matter what happens, the reader is glad to be aboard.
Read an excerpt from the book
Excerpt from Fun with Sailboats, © Peter Brennan:
The storm has pretty much blown itself out. We cut through Plum Gut, rounding Orient Point, and hang a hard left. The wind is still strong, but now it’s steady, predictable, useful. No longer howling and gusting. No longer frightening. Not that we were ever frightened. The sky is still one black cloud, but not hanging so low as it was. The waves are more like ripples. And now the wind is blowing great ragged windows in that blanketing black cloud. There’s a monstrous full moon behind there. The cloud is thick. When the moon is not near one of the openings, the night is black. Then the edge of one of the holes lights up bluish silver. When the moon, the whole moon, shines through, it’s bright enough to cast shadows, bright enough to read by.
And now I’m so relaxed I’m giddy. I didn’t notice the tension building, but I feel it draining away. And suddenly I notice the phosphorescence. The hull, the keel, the rudder, leave a trail of a million sparkles, a green-white glow. One moment the moon is shining brightly, reflected in every ripple on the surface of the water. The world is blue and silver. The next moment the sky and sea are black as pitch except the green-white sparks glowing in our wake. And now it starts to rain. It’s not a hard driving rain, but it’s definitely not a drizzle or mist. The raindrops are as big as marbles, and they’re plopping down, splashing down on the surface of the Long Island Sound. I can see the splashes maybe forty yards in every direction. And every splash makes a green-white flash.
