Amy and Jimmie were not sailors. Their experience included reading a few books, watching a couple of instructional videos, and sailing once a week for a year. They were land-lubberly, middle-class twentysomethings, audacious and in love. All they wanted was to be together and do something extraordinary. They quit their jobs, bought a boat that was categorically considered "too small" for ocean sailing, and left Portland, Oregon for the Sea of Cortez....

On his 81st birthday, without explanation, Karen Fisher-Alaniz's father placed two weathered notebooks on her lap. Inside were more than 400 pages of letters he'd written to his parents during WWII. She began reading them, and the more she read, the more she discovered about the man she never knew.

They began to meet for lunch every week, for her to ask him questions, and him to provide the answers. It was through this process that she discovered

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"More than the story of a single, savage engagement, Unsinkable traces the individual journeys of five men on one ship from Casablanca in North Africa, to Sicily and Salerno in Italy and then on to Plunkett's defining moment at Anzio, where a dozen-odd German bombers bore down on the ship in an assault so savage, so prolonged, and so deadly that one Navy commander was hard-pressed to think of another destroyer that had endured what Plunkett had. After...

The career of the USS Wahoo in sinking Japanese ships in the farthest reaches of the Empire is legendary in submarine circles. Christened three months after Pearl Harbor, Wahoo was commanded by the astonishing Dudley W. 'Mush' Morton, whose originality and daring new techniques led to results unprecedented in naval history; among them, successful 'down the throat' barrage against an attacking Japanese destroyer, voracious surface-running gun attacks,...

Story of the Seabees.

"Could you survive a storm at sea? "Abby Sunderland: Lost at Sea" in the True Survival series explores Sunderland's shocking survival story. The book is written with a high interest level and lower level of complexity to serve more mature students reading at lower levels. Clear visuals, colorful photographs (including images of the survivors!), and considerate text help with comprehension and wild facts hold the readers' interest from the first page...

"Young and in love, their lives ahead of them, Tami Oldham and her fiancé Richard Sharp set sail from Tahiti under brilliant blue skies, with Tami's hometown of San Diego as their ultimate destination. But the two free spirits and avid sailors couldn't anticipate that less than two weeks into their voyage, they would sail directly into one of the most catastrophic hurricanes in recorded history. They found themselves battling pounding rain, waves...

The story of America's little known war-within-a war-- that of the "silent service" --U.S. submarine warfare during World War II fought in the Pacific Ocean. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US entered World War II in December 1941 with only 44 Naval submarines-- many of them dating from the 1920s. With the Pacific battleship fleet decimated after Pearl Harbor, it was up to the feisty and heroic sailors aboard the US submarines to stop the...

"The true and remarkable life of Richard Willis (Will) Jackson, an intrepid seaman from one of the leading shipbuilding families in nineteenth-century Maine, whose exploits and adventures in the oceans of the world include surviving a harrowing shipwreck in the Marshall Islands, being washed overboard rounding Cape Horn, and running down Alaskan glaciers. His faithful letters to his family in Maine and his diary offer a compelling portrait of an extraordinary...