After a German submarine sinks the merchant barkentine Angelus, her 10 crew members are left to face the cold and merciless North Atlantic in a small open lifeboat without food or water. Over the next 10 horrifying days, 24-year-old Walter Boudreau witnesses the death of all but one of his shipmates. Miraculously, Boudreau survives. Just as incredible, this agonizing introduction to life before the mast does nothing to cool his passion for sailing. Over the next four decades, Captain Boudreau's love affair with the sea aboard his various schooners takes him through nautical adventures both thrilling and extraordinary. This book plots an exciting voyage from a shipwreck in the far north and the dramatic rescue of a stranded US naval vessel, to an eerie encounter with a tiger shark. We witness the terror of confronting a 65-foot rogue wave, a fight with drug pirates in the Bahamas, and the onslaught of a vicious hurricane. Journeying from Canada's East Coast to the Caribbean islands, across the raging Atlantic, and, finally, home to Canada, the trials and tribulations of a life at sea—including the tragic loss of several of Boudreau's beloved schooners—are tempered by the wonderful adventures of a life under sail.

In this book, Walter Boudreau's son, Robert Louis (Lou) Boudreau, has chronicled the stories his father passed on to him. As Lou Boudreau writes, "Although I have put pen to paper, it is my father who speaks in his own voice."