Sunk Without Trace: 30 dramatic accounts of yachts lost at sea

by Paul Gelder

By the same author as the bestselling Total Loss , this is a new collection of terrifying and compelling accounts of yachts lost at sea. The seven deadly causes of loss continue to take their toll, and Paul Gelder has compiled first-hand accounts of shipwreck and sinking caused by Collision, Gear Failure, Stress of Weather, Faulty Navigation, Fire, Crew Failure and Exhaustion.

The moving, emotionally charged descriptions of shipwrecked sailors abandoning their yachts at sea will have you on the edge of your seat. But these accounts are more than just gripping tales of disaster - they carry valuable lessons which the survivors have been able to pass on to all who go to sea for pleasure.

Praise for Total Loss:

'The tales provide gripping if sometimes unsettling reading and many valuable lessons.' - Cruising World

'Sure, you can learn from your own mistakes, but wouldn't you rather learn from theirs?' - Sailing

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2010

Reviews

[William Dashfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories in this book are all reprints, generally interesting and reasonably well written, contain valuable lessons and are well worth reading. Most of them are quite old, and relate to wooden boats, and often to problems specific to wooden boats. It would be good to have had more recent ones, and more about fibreglass boats.

A couple of gripes: 1) the books contains a number of stories that were originally published in "earlier editions of (his first book) 'Total Loss' and deserve not to be lost to the passage of time". In that case, why take them out of the later editions? Annoying to find them here instead of new material.

2) Each story finishes with a 'Lessons learned' section. Occasionally these were written by the original writer and these are almost all insightful and good value. Too often I found the ones written by PG just (annoyingly) regurgitated chunks of the story and didn't add anything new or any value - though I always read them in case they did.

Worth reading for the stories though.

[Tim Corke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sunk Without Trace is a collection of old stories and accounts belonging to sailors who lost their boats at sea. The stories date from the early 1900s up to 2010 where whales, hurricane winds, unknown floating objects and storms relentlessly combined to keep the number of boats on the sea down.

What's noticeable is that the majority of the sailors were experienced in offshore and inshore sailing and often sensed something was wrong before it happened. The skill and knowledge to turn a pleasant sail into a potential life-threatening survival situation is critical.

As a non-sailor, it's incredible that life and death are not so far apart on the sea and that its imperative to be well prepared, trained and unfortunately lucky.