Product Description

“I told God that if he would let us survive this night, I would make it mean something worthwhile. And then, somehow, I felt calmer than I have ever felt. Unreasonably so. Irrationally so. I looked over the scene of our wrecked life and I smiled–a crazy smile for sure–and I looked through the dark at the mad beauty of it.”
–Jean Silverwood

An exhilarating true-life adventure of one family’s extraordinary sea voyage of self-discovery and survival, tragedy and triumph

Successful businessman John Silverwood and his wife, Jean, both experienced sailors, decided the time was right to give their four children a taste of thrilling life on the high seas. And indeed their journey aboard the fifty-five-foot catamaran Emerald Jane would have many extraordinary and profound moments, whether it was the peaceful late-night watches John enjoyed under the stunning celestial sky or the elation shared by the whole family at the sight of blissful pods of dolphin and migrating tortoises. John and Jean had hoped to use the trip as a teaching opportunity, with the Emerald Jane as a floating classroom in which to instruct their children in important lessons–not only about the natural world but about the beauty of human life when stripped down to its essence, far from the trappings of civilization.

Yet rather than flourishing amid the new freedoms and responsibilities thrust upon them, the children were sometimes confused, frightened, resentful. The two oldest, fourteen-year-old Ben and twelve-year-old Amelia, missed their friends and the comfortable life left behind in San Diego, while the two youngest, Jack, seven, and Camille, three, picked up on the stressful currents running above and below the surface–for throughout the journey, the Silverwood family found its bonds tested as never before.

John and Jean, whose marriage had weathered its share of storms, would wonder again if they had taken on too much as the physical, emotional, and financial strains of caring for the expensive catamaran and their children brought old resentments to the surface.

John’s dream trip that began on Long Island Sound ended almost two years later as a nightmare in treacherous waters off a remote atoll in French Polynesia, where, in an explosion of awesome violence, the terrifying brunt of the ocean’s anger fell upon the Emerald Jane.

Gradually, in the crucible of the sea, a stronger, more closely knit unit was forged. The Silverwoods became a crew. Then they became a family again. But just as it seemed to them that they had mastered every challenge, their world was shattered in a split-second of unimaginable horror. Now their real challenge began, forcing them to fight for their very lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44487 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Released on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 2003, after two years at sea, the 55-foot catamaran sailed by the Silverwoods, a suburban California family that chucked it all to sail around the world, hit a reef off the South Pacific island of Scilly (now known as Manuae), putting the life of Jean and John and their four children (ages five to 16) in peril. The first part of the book is written from Jean's perspective as she opens with the wreck and then moves smoothly between the family's fight for survival and the story of their journey. By juxtaposing the two tales, Jean illustrates how the children's maturity and cohesiveness were not only a byproduct of the trip but also the keys to all the Silverwoods surviving their ordeal, especially John, who was critically injured by the falling mast. Jean wears her heart on her sleeve, and her writing about her marital problems or John's alcoholic relapses is honest. John's narrative is half as long as Jean's, underscoring his straight-to-the point personality and writing style. The saga from John's perspective lacks emotion, but his ability to interweave the story of the Julia Anne (a sailing ship that hit the same reef in 1855) gives an eye-opening account of how much and how little sea travel has changed in 150 years and accentuates the heroism of this family that overcame an extraordinary ordeal. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
John and Jean Silverwood live with their family in California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
[ 1 ]

a heart-shaped reef

In the same hour that the Emerald Jane was approaching Scilly Island in the South Pacific, my sister-in-law was alone in her New York home. A sharp crash made her jump: A watercolor of a racing sailboat had fallen from her wall to the hardwood floor. A wedding present from John and me, it had hung in the same spot for twenty-one years. Joanne, a little shaken, started calling around the family to find where we might be—she knew we were somewhere far at sea.

——

Below deck in our catamaran sailboat, my husband, John, stood in the doorway of our tiny stateroom. I can picture him there in that instant before everything changed. Our four children—we had pried them away from their suburban world for a thousand reasons—were busy elsewhere on the boat, settling in for the night. John had just told me how long it would probably take us to get to Fiji, our next destination by way of Tonga; some problems with the boom of the mainsail were slowing us down, but we could fix it in the morning. After Fiji, we would head for Australia. From there, the kids and I were planning to head home to the States, and John would stay long enough to clean up Emerald Jane and sell her—which can take months, and I worried about that. I guess I was worried about what might become of our marriage after this long adventure. I was also worried about the whole idea of selling a ship that had become like one of the family; I thought it would be particularly hard on John, who loved her the most.

We had done what we set out to do two years earlier when we first set sail. Along the way, our children’s eyes had opened to the beauty of the world. The kids were very strong characters now, very different from when we began. We loved them in new ways—maybe deeper ways, because we had taken the time to finally get to know them.

John said he had just finished a sweet conversation under the stars with Amelia, our fourteen-year-old daughter, during her turn at the wheel. She had followed him back inside and, by tossing the life vest to her sixteen-year-old brother, Ben, turned the “watch” over to him. He had been watching the movie Drop Dead Gorgeous on a laptop. Movies on DVD were a vestige of our once and future life, and Ben needed a dose of that now and then, as did we all. The boat was on automatic pilot as Ben prepared to go aft for his two-hour watch.

Everybody was finally happy to be together—it had taken a few thousand miles, but the family now seemed in synch and content. I don’t mean that it was perfect, but we had learned to live together in a tight space without too much drama.

We had about a minute left.

With our autopilot engaged, the boat was sailing itself in this moment. We thought.

I was propped up in bed with a laptop as John chatted from the doorway. He looked good. He is a handsome, green-eyed guy full of fun and energy. People sometimes say he looks like Dennis Quaid. Maybe so. He does have strong features and he’s certainly handsome. He has serious eyes that always give away what he’s thinking. He has, or rather had, a dark mustache. Amelia and I talked him into throwing it overboard during the long sail across the Pacific. He’s even better-looking with-out it.

He hadn’t had a drink since his big meltdown in the Caribbean, and I was pretty much in love with him again.

So you can picture the crew: Amelia looks a little older than her fourteen years. She has long, dark strawberry blond hair, and big, empathetic brown eyes. She is very fit, with a great, honest smile and the hint of dimples. She is very pretty and has a natural charisma that has always filled the space around her. She is eminently sensible, a peacemaker, Daddy’s girl. Ben, her older brother by a year and a half, is the surfer archetype: very blond hair, dazzling blue eyes, great smile when it breaks through the gloom of family unfairness, tallish to the point where he sometimes stoops a bit to fit into a crowd. Despite his rock shirts and his surfer looks, you would say he appears quite respectable: a top achiever in Scouts, perhaps, which is exactly right. Little green-eyed Camille, five, has long golden hair, pink cheeks, and a huge smile, which is nearly always beaming. Jack, her freckled nine-year-old brother, seems to have stepped out of an old Our Gang film: the neighborhood tough guy. His mouth is always a little open in wonder. His blond hair and hazel eyes are usually seen only in the blur of his constant explorations. My own hair is long and blond and my eyes are brown, like Amelia’s. I do apologize for the fact that we might seem like Southern California stereotypes. Guilty, I suppose.

It was just after dark in a lonely reach of the South Pacific. As we sped westward, the ocean floor was a mile below us—or it was supposed to be.

Then at that moment everything changed.

Like when microphone feedback suddenly fills an auditorium until you must cover your ears, a deafening shrill exploded through the boat. It seemed to come from everywhere. A big jostle. Horrible, gouging, scraping chalkboardlike sounds. The twin hulls under us were screaming. John looked at me the way someone in the next seat of an airplane might look if, at forty thousand feet, all the engines just quit. I had never seen him so instantly confused and horrified—then came the great shaking and crash as we bounced more violently between the iron-hard treetops of submerged coral, sharp as butcher knives. Seconds later we slammed full-on into the coral reef. Our home, the Emerald Jane, came to a ripping halt, and the great waves of the Pacific exploded around us in a deafening, continuous roar. John caught himself against the doorway. “My God!” he shouted, his eyes drilling crazily into mine. Everything about our lives had just changed and we knew it. Our lives, our children’s lives, could end in the dark of the sea in what? A minute from now? Less?

“Reef!” Ben screamed from the deck.

“It cannot be coral! We’re miles . . .” John yelled to himself and me as he bounded up the small stairway—I was right behind him.

“Dad! Dad! What’s happening?” Amelia shouted over the roaring surf and the loud tearing of the boat against the coral. She tried to cut him off in the salon. The Drop Dead laptop was dead on the floor; things had fallen everywhere. Our two younger kids, Jack and Camille, were on the salon’s big wraparound sofa under the front windows, petrified and gritting their teeth, their eyes incredibly wide and their hands hovering in front of them with their little fingers outstretched, shaking.

“It’s a reef, guys. We’re on a reef. We’ll be fine,” John said without stopping, pushing Amelia aside and running aft through the open glass door of the salon and leaping up the step to the teak deck of the cock-pit. His eyes were terrified and the kids saw that. They had never seen him like this before—though they had seen a lot. Then I came through behind him, grabbed flashlights, and they saw my eyes. I didn’t believe John’s quick analysis that we’d be fine. The kids took no comfort in it either. His eyes, truer than his lips, were saying, we are in very serious trouble.

He had been so careful to navigate us far around the coral atoll islands in this stretch of sea. Back in Tahiti, he had replaced the autopilot’s computer to make sure we had the very best.

As we looked over the edge of the deck into the dark sea—the moon had not yet risen—our flashlights revealed millions of hard, red fingers of coral tearing at our boat through the boiling surf. Our lights would not last for long, and John would soon be asking Ben to take a knife and do the unthinkable. So much would happen this night in the dark.

John threw the engine hard into reverse just as a high wave crested violently over the stern and over him with a loud crash. The double hulls smashed again with a horrible sound into the coral. He leapt through the flash flood on deck to reach the controls of the other engine. He hit the start button and pushed it hard into reverse. Both engines could not even begin to pull the boat off the reef.

Only the front, smaller jib sail, called the genoa and nicknamed the genny, had been in use. It absolutely had to be hauled down this instant if the engines were to have any chance. John pulled the genny’s thick Dacron line off one of the two stainless-steel, hourglass-shaped winches behind the wheels. The wind should have instantly spilled from the sail, but, in the windy whip and tangle of the moment, the line had jammed in a pulley somewhere forward. Ben, enough of a sailor now to understand that the sail had to be cut, snapped the handle of a diving knife into his father’s hand.

John zigzagged forward along the lurching deck. Crouching near the bow, he cut the line. As the genny snapped free to flap in the wind, the large metal reinforced tip of the sail—where the lines tie on—whistled toward his face. He leapt backward as it just missed his eyes; he had seen the glint of it coming thanks to flashlights Ben and Amelia were now shining forward from the aft deck.

The surf roared like a tumble of jet engines all around us. We were screaming to each other just to be heard.

I ran into the salon to help get the kids ready for our escape. Little Jack and Camille were still frozen in fear on the wraparound sofa—just sitting there hugging each other and shaking horribly. There were loud popping and cracking sounds. Looking down the stairs into the port hull, I was suddenly watching a disaster movie; it couldn’t be real: Water was filling the starboard hull as if a dam had burst. The view down the little stair-way was of water rushing floor to ceiling from Amelia’s room toward Ben’s. Her tennis shoes and bedclothes and books were swirling in the...

Customer Reviews

I couldn't put it down.
If you've ever extended yourself, spent time outdoors or been exposed to the many elements of nature, you know this story could easily be about you. It grips you right at the start as you sense the tearing of the hulls and rushing and pounding of the ocean destroying everything and probably everyone they care about in a matter of minutes. The interweaving of the travels and exploration with the horror of the destruction of boat and flesh keeps you hanging on and waiting for the next piece of news. This is a great story of human bonds, nature and endurance.

Lessons learned at sea
John and Jean Silverwood decide to put their busy daily lives aside and take their four children on a round the world adventure at sea. The Silverwoods feel as though the fast pace of life in San Diego has pulled the family in too many directions. They purchase the Emerald Jane and set of on an once-in-a-lifetime adventure with Ben (14), Amelia (12), Jack (7), and Camille (3). Using the sea and new ports as a school and hoping to satiate John's seemingly endless need for adrenalin, the Silverwoods also have to manage worries about pirates, unfriendly ports, balky generators and whatever the sea throws at them. The close quarters of the catamaran make clashes inevitable as Ben, missing his friends and diversions in California becomes sullen, Jean worries and John slips into old habits and the dream voyage threatens to become a battle of wills. However, the beauty of the sea, the sea life, new ports, discovering new friends and discovering new strengths within themselves, the Silverwoods keep on their journey until the unthinkable happens. The Emerald Jane hits a reef and the family`s survival depends on the lessons learned at sea.



This is an engrossing book that kept me hooked right till the end of the first portion. The portion about the Julia Ann and her crew and fate, not as interesting. I also had bit of a hard time with Jean's excusing John's behaviors (selfishness?) and putting herself down in comparison. That said, this is as much a tale of a family's growth as a tale of a journey

The Pefect Summer Read
If you're looking for the perfect summer read, you won't do much better than this tale of a successful San Diego real estate developer who lives out a lifelong dream by taking his perfect SoCal family of six on a sailing trip around the world, which turns into a nightmare when they run aground on a Pacific reef 350 miles due west of Tahiti, costing him his leg in the process. This first-person diary account reveals the Silverwood family dynamic on board their beloved Emerald Jane, warts and all, from John's own battles with alcoholism to Jean's control issues to the various adjustments of the kids--16-year-old Ben's longing for his friends back home and eventual emergence as a hero, 13-year-old Amelia's blossoming into a self-confident artist, 9-year-old Jack's fascination with ocean life and 5-year-old Camille's angelic innocence. There is something here that anyone with a family can relate to about escaping the rat race of modern life and taking to the high seas, anchoring in exotic ports from Bora Bora and Raiatea to Grenada and the Galapagos, crossing the Equator, sailing through the Panama Canal, being chased by pirates and surviving hurricanes with waves several stories high. The first 150 pages, narrated by Jean, describe the family's day-to-day duties, home-schooling the kids and how each one adapted to the journey, as she keeps coming back to the narrative's singular event--the wreck of the Emerald Jane on a reef in the middle of the night and the boat's giant mast pinning John's leg underneath. It's an amazing tale, with the last quarter including John's ruminations, which have him questioning his judgment and dealing with his own guilt by channeling an accident that took place 150 years ago on the very same reef that ripped apart his own sailboat. The Julia Ann, a vessel on its way from Australia to San Francisco in 1855, carrying coals from Newcastle in New South Wales, along with a group of Mormon missionaries bound for Utah, suffered a similar fate as the Emerald Jane. The story is a tribute to the family's gung-ho spirit of living to the fullest, and dealing with the consequences...as a family. "If real life catches you by the heel sometimes, it is worth it," John concludes. "Life is short anyway, so it may as well be beautiful." Not just a travelogue or a primer on sailing around the world, Black Wave is the story of a family that circled the ocean, only to find what they were looking for was right in front of them all along.