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With Reckless Abandon


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Our most recently published manuscript:

 

"With Reckless Abandon"

By Captain Jim Sharp

 







 

 

 

 

                                                                             

Sharp Adventures.com

                                                                                      ~

And, It's  a brand new book--
 having just come off the press!                     


Here's a bedazzling, rip roaring adventure

 from the log book of Captain Jim Sharp

Published 2007 by Devereux Books
of Marblehead

 

     The story of a man and his schooner

 i

"I drove her...I drove her unmercifully.
I'd cut her no slack"

 

 
The life and times of Captain Jim Sharp is a story that needed to be told.  It is a boot-stomping, salty sea tale of a most venerable Grand Banks schooner named Adventure and how, at the skipper's hand, she flew across the seas of the Maine coast, storming along at fourteen knots under six thousand feet of straining canvas.  How Captain Jim owned and operated what seemed an armada of commercial vessels, from windjammers, to tug boats, to freight boats and yachts, all sailing from the man's own wharf in Camden Harbor. Published now, it is available immediately at the publisher, or:

                                    info@sharpadventures.com

                                 

 What they are saying:

                                 "It's full of salty, fascinating stories...written by a natural-born story
                                 teller and sailor beyond compare. Captain Jim's book is a compelling read!"
                                                          Peter Spectre, Author, Camden, Maine

                                 "Well written, engaging.....I must say, I enjoyed every minute of it."
                                                         Llewellyn Howland, Books and Prints, Jamaica Plain, Ma

                                  "My precocious understudy has turned the tables on his mentor. Is there
                                  anything this young upstart won't tackle? By golly, what a read!"
                                                         Joseph E. Garland, Author, "Glosta", Ma

                                   "His sea stories, commitment and passion will captivate your pleasures.
                                   Prepare to wipe the salt spray from your cheeks in the pages of this book."
                                                        Captain Marge Pratt, Chapman School of Seamanship
 

  It's now available for $18.95

                              Plus shipping from

            Devereux Books, Box 503, Marblehead, Ma. 01945

       The quickest way: call 1-781-631-3055

         Or click on www.devereuxbooks.co

                                   ~

              Have you a special interest in Adventure....     Past passenger perhaps....    A friend....  or  just  want to swap sea stories....? 

                                      Email or call me. 

       I'll personalize your book and spin you a yarn!  1-207-215-3156   

                                    Email-   Info@sharpadventures.com

                                                     ~

        click down to the bottom of the page
                 for book reviews
                         ~               

 Captain Jim and his wife Meg have since voyaged all over Europe in their own Dutch canal boat, and explored almost every waterway of the U.S. and Canada from Texas to Quebec, writing stories of their travels as they went. They've had recent articles of some cruises in Soundings, (November 2005 link to read) and in Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors, (June-July 2006-book review in Autumn 2007- link) and the beat goes on.  Now, after sailing over 50,000 nautical miles in all kinds of craft, the captain is working on his newest manuscript:
      Ten Years Cruising Europe in a Ninety-Year-Old Barge.
He will soon offer an amusing, continental chronicle of Dutch coffee, Belgian lace, and Bordeaux wine while cruising thousands of kilometers of fascinating canals, hundreds of challenging locks, and a myriad of fresh, new, exotic, European adventures.

 

                           Lots of things in the wind

 
      How could any one addict own this many vessels?

                                                            

                                                    

                                                                                                             

                                           

   -Book reviews -With Reckless Abandon-
            Maine Sunday telegram - Portland press  Herald
   A must read for the boat-obsessed, fixer-uppers----by John Robinson, July 2007
 
Captain Jim Sharp has penned a big-hearted, joyfully told tale of his 50 years aboard every kind of vessel along the coast of Maine.  As the owner of a fleet of windjammers working out of Camden, he has chaperoned thousands of summer visitors into the deadly fog of Penobscot Bay and brought them safely back to port.
One prominent businessman told him, "I came on this schooner for some peace and  quiet so I could face and solve two overwhelming monumental problems in my life. One affects my personal home life and the other my future business career, and you know, after a week on this schooner, I can't remember what they are."
Sharp's engaging memoir will transport interested readers in a similar way. Capt. Jim's unlikely odyssey as a seafaring man started in Upper Darby, Pa., where he took over his father's finance company. He found the business bleak and ran off to sea while a  series of secretaries pretended he was on vacation, out to lunch, or would be back any minute.
When the lonely secretaries were repeatedly robbed, Sharp came to a turning point.  "I made the decision to starve if I must, to struggle if I must, to be poor if I must, but life is too short for such grief...I could afford some reckless abandon."
And he showed some. Within six months of that decision he owned the love of his life. Adventure, a deep-drafted Gloucester fishing schooner retired from runs to the Grand Banks. Toting a guitar and an unbelievable amount of enthusiasm, Sharp rebuilt the battered schooner into the pride of the Down East fleet.
Sharp's giggly enthusiasm for all things afloat is infectious.  At the back of this book is a list of more than 50 boats, sail, steam, oil and gas, that Capt. Jim saved from oblivion, fixed up, used and sold on his way to still more boats. Although he has a bone to pick with the Coast Guard inspectors, it is hard to imagine any five inspectors keeping up with his continually evolving fleet.
One of the sailboats that Sharp saved from oblivion is now the official ship of the State of Maine: the Bowdoin. In 1969, she was rotting at the Mystic Seaport Museum after Adm. Macmillan donated the Arctic schooner for educational purposes.
Sharp writes about her condition, "The poor old thing! There she lay. Ignored, paint falling off in sheets, tied to the wharf with a ratty rope, covered with a plastic shed full of holes and looking as forlorn as a starving cur."
Bad publicity forced the museum to relinquish the ship, but on the way to Maine from Connecticut, the overloaded trailer containing the Bowdoin's rigging and blocks caught fire and was nearly destroyed. It took a full year of volunteer labor and a new mast cut in Aroostook County to save the old schooner from utter destruction. Today she is the pride of Maine thanks to Sharp's foresight.
Told with brio, Sharp's memoir is a must have for arm-chair sailors, wooden-boat fanatics and stubborn do-it-yourself, full-steam-ahead fixer-uppers.

Soundings Magazine
                "Oh my God! I just bought two vessels in two weeks and didn't
                have even a slim ounce of regret! What a hopeless addict is me"
Trading adversity for Adventure-
Author Capt. Jim Sharp believes that, in addition to keeping him out of a foxhole in Korea, his childhood bout with polio gave him a stubborn recklessness that enabled him to pursue his sea-faring adventures.
"With Reckless Abandon" ($18.95, Devereux Books, April 2007) is his story - told in a breezy conversational tone -  through some three dozen boats and three marriages, of those adventures afloat and the characters he encountered from Maine's foggy coast to the Great Lakes and Europe.
The book details his diverse experiences: his passion for boats led him to spend two decades taking vacationers on weekly Maine cruises aboard the 122-foot Adventure, which he purchased in 1966; and to convert a 125- foot tugboat into a restaurant in Camden (serving the likes of Walter Cronkite and others). Captain Jim even had a brush with Hollywood when a studio came to Camden in 1977 to film the remake of Kipling's "Captains Courageous." Local Lobsterman Phil Raynes said of the movie-making fuss, "With all the jeezly weather we git here, you wouldn't suppose they would need t' come in here with all that machinery ter make a little rain and a litle breeze.
He ends his book with a four-page appendix of vessels he's owned, along with remarks about them, such as Spodie Odie, a 26-foot twin-screw powercat.  Of this particular vessel, he writes, for "fishing and goin' like hell."

Bangor Daily News by Emmet Meara
"Captains book boatloads of fun.
"With Reckless Abandon" by Captain Jim Sharp, Devereux Books, 2007 paper-back, $18.95.
Jim Sharp was obsessed his whole adult life.  He couldn't keep his eyes or hands off them.
In his book "With Reckless Abandon," Sharp admitted she "was the closest thing to an object of worship... She was more than attractive in a thousand different ways. She had history, intrigue, humor, challenge, personality, all trunneled together into one hull.  Just one look at this old girl and I was hooked." he confessed.
Of course, anyone who knew the retired Camden schooner captain would realize hat he was talking about not women, but his long line of boats and ships. The book has a four-page appendix just dealing with the Sharp "fleet."
Sharp is best-known for his long love affairs with the celebrity schooners Adventure and Bowdoin.
The book reads like love letters to his old ships.
"Sailing the Adventure to me was like sailing a living museum. It was all hemp rigging, deadeyes and lanyards, and heavy canvas. I gloried, too in the great height and patina of those enormous wooden masts. There was no sound of our going save that of the hiss of the water sliding under our stout oak hull. She infected me with her soul and made me her slave," he said.
Obsessed!  (more)

 

And this is not all:

                                                      stay tuned!

 

                                     to sharpadventures.com

 

For more windjammer information contact The Maine Windjammer Assoc. www.sailmainecoast.com


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