Without a Paddle: Racing Twelve Hundred Miles Around Florida by Sea Kayak »

WARREN RICHEY's career as a journalist has taken him from his hometown paper in Red Bank, New Jersey, to assignments around the world. Currently with The Christian Science Monitor, he splits his time between Florida and Washington, D.C.

As far as Warren Richey knew, his life was on course. A reporter with a beautiful wife and talented son, Richey couldn’t imagine how it could be any better....Then his marriage falls apart and he can’t imagine how it could be any worse.

The divorce leaves Richey questioning everything, while struggling to find a way forward. To get his bearings, he enters the first Ultimate Florida Challenge, an all-out twelve-hundred-mile kayak race around Florida.

The UFC is less of a race than it is a dare or a threat. The thirty-day deadline sets a grueling, twenty-four-hour-a-day pace through shark- , alligator- , and even python-infested waters. But those twelve hundred miles are only a fraction of a journey that pulls Richey back to when he was embedded with troops in Iraq, reporting on missing children, and hiking the mountains of Montana with his son, and shows him where he went wrong, where he went right, and how to do it better the second time around.

Warren Richey’s memoir Without a Paddle is a remarkable physical and emotional journey that cuts to the heart of what it means to be a man, a husband, and a father.

Publishers Weekly

At its core, the idea of traveling 1,200 miles around the coast of Florida in a kayak sounds grueling--the organizers of the Ultimate Florida Challenge warn wouldbe entrants that "even if you are a wellprepared expert, you may die." But Richey, who writes for the Christian Science Monitor, shows in this fast-paced memoir that a persevering spirit can overcome all physical and mental exhaustion. Still feeling the effects of a divorce that threw his world into upheaval, Richey finds solace in his sea kayak and enters the competition, despite the objections of family and friends. Nearly every day and night, he encounters all possible obstacles: physical ailments (blisters, sore muscles, sleep deprivation), the threat of predators like alligators and pythons, and solitude while paddling through the night. On a diet consisting largely of bagels and Snickers bars, Richey travels on, battling himself and the biggest enemy of all: the clock, as the rules mandate the race be completed within 30 days. Much of the tale centers on his nautical journey, but Richey seamlessly weaves that with his heartbreak from divorce, the bond of a father and son, and moving on with a newfound love. By the end of this wonderfully uplifting book, Richey's trip has taken him well beyond the perimeter of the Sunshine State. (July)