-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)
How could any one
addict own this many vessels?
i
