THE SHELL AND THE OCTOPUS

A memoir of life with a peripatetic father who had an unquenchable passion for the sea.

Stirling first boarded a sailboat in the early 1970s, when she was just a toddler. The small custom-built sailing yacht Cattle Creek, which her father constructed in Peng Chau, Hong Kong, would become the most consistent home that Stirling would know for more than 20 years. Her earliest memories are of being at sea with her parents; she describes her young-child wonderment, lying on her mother’s lap on deck, looking at the moon: “She comes bright in the black night sky like a surprise, illuminating her path to us. She instigates the plankton in our wake and they glow like fairy dust.” By the time she was 4, she’d sailed from Peng Chau to Manila, on to Singapore, across the Indian Ocean to the Seychelles, and then flown with her mother to Europe, winding up on the Isle of Wight, where she briefly attended kindergarten. In between voyages, the American family was based in Colorado, where the author’s father built houses and acquired real estate holdings. When she was 10, her parents divorced, but by then she’d absorbed her father’s love of sailing as well as his restlessness. Over the next years, she joined him, his friends, and his girlfriends on journeys traversing the Caribbean and the South Pacific. This is a memoir of coming of age on the high seas, and in it, the author offers a collection of vivid portraits of places and relationships, including her first serious romance. Readers will almost feel the misty saltwater coming over the bow, the discomfort of the primitive in-cabin accommodations, and the raw frustrations of a young girl dealing with a father who was “so happy when…leaving port” but sullen, agitated, and often intoxicated onshore. Although the accounts of Stirling’s early memories are fragmented, recollections from later years, culled from her journals, are viscerally and eloquently detailed descriptions of the beauty, loneliness, and rowdiness of the extraordinary world of her formative years.

A poignant and lyrical read that will ring true with sailors and interest landlubbers.