Aka

by Tristan Jones

In a last-ditch stab at fortune and glory, middle-aged adventurer Bill Conan enters a 30,000-mile single-handed round-the-world race. This ultimate test of skill, strength, and endurance leads him across the treacherous Atlantic Ocean's vast expanse, where a sudden change in wind throws him off balance and sends him overboard. Alone in the still, open sea, he struggles to keep from drowning, knowing it is a fight that he will eventually lose. But Conan has stumbled into the migratory path of a bottle-nosed dolphin named Aka and his tribe. In an exhilarating encounter, he senses Conan's plight, communicates with him, and works to keep him afloat and alive. A stirring adventure tale, Aka depicts the ancient history of dolphins, their extraordinary traits and abilities, and their eternal friendship with humans.

Genres: Fiction

264 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Arthur Jones, pen name Tristan Jones was a prolific English author and mariner. His stories, mostly about sailing, are a combination of both fact and fiction, and it is rather difficult to tell these apart.
He was an illegitimate child, and was raised mainly in orphanages. He joined the Royal Navy in 1946, and served for 14 years. After ending his career in the Navy, he bought a sailboat, became a whiskey smuggler, and scraped a living sailing the Mediterranean Sea.
After his left leg was amputated in 1982 (a result of health problems and accidents), he resumed sailing and sailed the trimaran Outward Leg from San Diego to London, then across central Europe by river and canal to the Black Sea, and then around south Asia to Thailand.
After the amputation of his right leg in 1991 he only returned briefly to sea, and he lived in Phuket, Thailand, he converted to Islam and took on the name 'Ali'.

Reviews

[Roger Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel about the interactions between humans and dolphins. There was something that bothered me for a while. There are long sections of the story told from the point of view of the dolphins. It is clear that the author bases the novel on research that indicates that dolphins may have intelligence on par with or even exceeding the intelligence of humans. I started being irritated, though, that the author was presuming to understand how the dolphins saw humans and how they saw one another. After all, how could he put himself in the minds of dolphins? At best it was highly speculative. When I started using the word speculative to describe my criticism, though, I started to change my mind. I am a great fan of speculative fiction and especially the kind of speculative fiction called science fiction. If you peruse my bookshelves you will see that I most certainly do read other genres though. When I started reading this book I had every expectation that it was from one of those other genres. I am not sure how I had it categorized in my mind, perhaps as just literature. The more I thought of how speculative these passages from the point of view of the dolphins were, though, the more I realized that it was science fiction. It was not marketed as science fiction and there was nothing to indicate that it was science fiction before I started reading it, but it was science fiction anyway. Once I understood that, my irritation disappeared and I decided that it works quite well as science fiction. As I continued to read there were references to ancient Atlantis and that made it verge on fantasy, but I don't think it went so far in that direction that it was taken out of the science fiction realm. On finishing it I decided that all in all I quite enjoyed the book. It was only that I was getting science fiction with absolutely no expectation of science fiction that put me off at first. By the way, the dolphins are portrayed as well disciplined and cooperative members of a society. This shows very well when they rescue a man who fell overboard in midocean. They approached the task of rescue as if they were a well organized military unit.

[Ari · Rating 3 out of 5]

First the good: although this work is fiction, if half of what Jones tells us about Dolphins is true, then it's a fascinating and worthwhile read. Jones delves into the communication and sonar abilities of bottle-nose dolphins, and while I suspect that much of what he writes about pod life is factual, I loved the way he added his fiction to it, making the dolphins infinitely wiser and more spiritual than humans.

The bad: The size of the type in the edition I read was painfully small. Also, I felt that Jones used far too many technical sailing terms for the average reader. Telling me that the main character "...eased the halyard of the shaking mainsail, slowly, a little at a time, and with difficulty reefing it to the boom as he did so, "...and that he "...released the preventer, grabbed the wheel, and heaved in the mainsheet to take up slack,..." meant nothing to me.

Still, a different sort of story about man facing the unpredictable and sometimes ruthless natural world.

[Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Parts of this book were quite interesting, but it didn't seem like the parts were developed into a cohesive unit. I enjoyed all the sailing references, but the whole dolphin thing was a little too "out there" for me - and the ending was just plain silly.

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cheesy novel that reeks of the John Lilly pseudo-science of the late 60's/ early 70's. Still, if you can put up with the movie Day of the Dolphin or the talking dolphin in SeaQuest, you might enjoy this. The scene where the sailor falls off his boat is chilling.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

A LITTLE OUT THERE. NOT LIKE HIS OTHER BOOKS THAT I'VE READ.