Review
WL Rating
In 1965, 16-year-old Robin Lee Graham became the youngest person to attempt to single-handedly sail around the world. While his story was originally told in a series of National Geographic installments, Dove is the complete account of his five-year journey. As a young teenager, Graham’s father took the family on a thirteen-month sailing expedition to Polynesia. Not surprisingly, Graham couldn’t return to the rote learning, fixed schedules, and daily grind of school. Two years later, his father bought Graham a 24-foot sailboat christened Dove, and rigged her to circumnavigate the globe. Hours after Graham set sail his world simultaneously expanded and shrank. Although he would see more of the world in five years than most people do in a lifetime, rampant loneliness plagued him whenever he left port. But as fate would have it, while in Fiji he met Patti, a California girl also traveling on her own. From this point on, Graham isn’t so much sailing alone as he is forcing Dove to the next port where he and Patti will meet again, play for a few weeks/months, and eventually marry. Dove is mainly a paean to Patti with a call to live naturally, and a denunciation of conventional 1960’s living. But, Dove is also one of those rare sailing books that just might make a reader buy a boat and hit the open sea. A good read. (Review content contributed by @sea-spout via StokeReport.com - March 2010)
Dove - Robin Lee Graham
