Okay. Imagine selling your house, leaving your job, buying a 31 foot sailboat (i.e. about the length of a “first down and ten set of poles” on the football fied), outfitting it with water, food, books, and flares and setting out from Southhampton, UK for New Zealand, some 6000 miles and many months away.

All right, if you can imagine that, now try to imagine that while having sailed through the Panama Canal and now heading towards the Galapagos Islands, 600 miles off Ecuador, your 31 foot yacht is rammed by a breaching sperm whale sending the boat to the bottom of the sea while you and your partner scramble to move as much of your gear as possible into a raft and a dinghy.  Got that?

Well, that’s exactly what Maralyn and Maurice Bailey encountered in March, 1973 beginning an ordeal of 118 days at sea before they were miraculously spotted and rescued by a Korean fishing ship.

In this, her first book, Sophie Elmhirst, a London-based journalist has done a terrific job tellling this story, terrific enough to have the NYT list it as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year!  She balances details about the weather, the seas, the sharks, and nautical jargon with the raw life-threatening realities of not enough water, food, space, medical stuff, etc. to tell this incredible story with skill and verve.  As the reviewer in the NYT wrote, ” In Elmhirst’s delicate, humane depiction of the couple, her choice of narrative framing, her pacing and her compassion, she renders “A Marriage at Sea” an act of beauty in its own right. I found myself, alternately, holding my breath as I read at top speed, wandering rooms in search of someone to read aloud to, and placing the book facedown, arrested by quiet statements that left me reeling with their depth. “Dying is still a process,” Elmhirst writes; “you’re still alive while you’re dying.” And, “Boats, like humans, are in a state of permanent decline.”

That was pretty much my reaction in reading this compelling and unsettling book, alternating with eagerness to get back to the story while cringing at the thought of what they were going through.  How could they manage to survive?  Why didn’t they just give up and go over the side of their raft and find peace?  Maurice was often nearly there while Maralyn refused to yield,  endlessly creating things as diverse as fishing hooks from safety pins, dominos and playing cards from pages of her journal, and even catching two small turtles to keep as pets.

Elmhirst skillfully provides us with full pictures of these two remarkable yet everyday people starting with their lives before courting, their early marriage years , and then the whirlwind time after being rescued, months of fame with features in newspapers, magazines, and TV.  As billed by the NYT, this is a ‘best book’ and worth the discomfort of living through their ordeal with them.  As for me, I’ll stay on dry land, thank you.