Pacific Lady: The First Woman to Sail Solo across the World's Largest Ocean »

Sharon Sites Adams, Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year in 1969, is a popular speaker, making appearances and telling her story before various organizations and gatherings.

Karen J. Coates is a journalist, a correspondent for Gourmet magazine, and a contributor to numerous publications, including Archaeology, the Christian Science Monitor, and Fodor’s Travel Guides. She is the author of Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War.

It was an age without GPS and the Internet, without high-tech monitoring and instantaneous reporting. And it was a time when women simply didn’t do such things. None of this deterred Sharon Sites Adams. In June 1965 Adams made history as the first woman to sail solo from the mainland United States to Hawaii. Four years later, just as Neil Armstrong very publicly stepped onto the moon, the diminutive Adams, alone and unobserved, finally sighted Point Arguello, California, after seventy-four days sailing a thirty-one-foot ketch from Japan, across the violent and unpredictable Pacific. She was the first woman to do so, setting another world record.
 

Inspiring and exciting, Adams’s memoir recounts the personal path leading to her historic achievements: a tomboy childhood in the Oregon high desert, an early marriage and painful divorce, and a second marriage that ended when her husband died of cancer. In the wake of his death and almost by accident, Adams discovered sailing. Six weeks after her first sailing lesson she bought a boat, and within eight months she set out to achieve her first world record. Pacific Lady recounts the inward journey that paralleled her sailing feats, as Adams drew on every scrap of courage and navigational skill she could muster to overcome the seasickness, exhaustion, and loneliness that marked her harrowing crossings.

Alfred T. Goodwin

“From the time I reached chapter 3, until Sea Sharp landed in Oahu, I could not put the book down. It is a work of suspense, which will bring out the amateur psychologist in any reader. Why did Sharon do it? Human autonomy can produce amazing results. The second trip is even more amazing. Go, Sharon!”

—Alfred T. Goodwin, senior judge, U.S. Court of Appeals

Introduction Alone 1

Pt. 1 Out to Sea

1 A Widow Finds the Sea 13

2 Fit for the Journey 20

3 The First Sail 33

4 Storm 47

5 Whispers at Sea 53

6 A Life to Ponder 59

7 A One-Hand Finish 66

Pt. 2 Adventure on Water

8 South Pacific Interlude 85

9 Queen Mary to Hollywood 106

Pt. 3 Across the Pacific

10 Another Sea Sharp 115

11 Alone Again on Water 126

12 Things Fall Apart 137

13 74 Days, 17 Hours, 15 Minutes 147

14 A Pink Return 171

Pt. 4 In the Wake of Fame

15 Sailing On 185

Glossary 189