CAROLINA SAILING
By Dan Dickison
Summer Reading for Sailors The dog days of summer are upon us. It’s time to slow down and unwind. And that means time for a little reading. Here are some South Carolina-based recommendations for sailors. Jackpot: High Times, High Seas and the Sting that Started the War on Drugs by Jason Ryan Jason Ryan’s Jack Pot traces the exploits of two gentlemen smugglers from the Carolina Lowcountry. Photo by Dan Dickison.
Some 40 years ago, the shores of the Lowcountry around Hilton Head Island served a novel brand of smugglers, “gentlemen smugglers” they came to be called. Ryan’s well-researched book traces the lives of two good ol’ Southern boys who grew up in the Palmetto State and attended college there before dropping out and eventually ending up in Key West. Both Barry Foy and Les Riley started out as small time
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Also set in the 1970s, Grim-rud’s narrative reveals the experiences that he and his wife Jane had while living aboard their home-designed and built 46-foot, ferrocement sloop Dursmirg. Grimsrud focuses his tale on time spent in the South Carolina Sea Islands from Dafuskie in the north to Sapelo Island in the south. In 1972, the Grimsruds launched their 20-ton, raiseddeck home in Superior, WI, and headed south to escape the snow. The book—a blend of narrative passages interspersed with letters Jane wrote to her parents—is a reminiscence of how life in the Sea Islands once was: sparsely populated, teaming with sea life and transpiring at a glacial pace. (Grimsrud has written nine other books about voyaging aboard Dursmirg in various areas.)
One family takes a year off to circumnavigate the North Atlantic. Photo by Dan Dickison.
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Sailing the Sea Islands: Travels of Dursmirg by John M. Grimsrud
Sequoiah Speeds: A Memoir of a Family Afloat by Helen Warren
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smugglers, stuffing sailboats to the sheer with marijuana and hashish and hauling it across the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Both men grew their enterprises in less than a decade to become two of the most successful drug smugglers of that era. Ryan keenly distinguishes the duo from their peers in the drug world by emphasizing that they eschewed violence as much as they loved pleasure. His lively book traces the duo’s parallel exploits as their respective businesses flourish, they become millionaires, and then meet their downfall at the hands of a zealous federal prosecutor bent on making a name for himself. As the book’s subtitle proclaims, this is a story of gentlemen smugglers begetting the infamous war on drugs.
The author weaves an engaging narrative about a typical American family from Charleston—her own—that takes a year off to venture across the Atlantic for a oncein-a-lifetime odyssey under sail. This self-published account traces the Warrens’ acquisition of their 39-foot ketch, Sequoiah, the months of preparation and the family’s circumnavigation of the North Atlantic, across to England, down to the Azores, and back across to the Caribbean Islands. Ultimately, they return north to the Palmetto State. Warren’s memoir is a pleasing account of the comwww.southwindsmagazine.com