Alone through the roaring forties

Alli got me Vito Dumas' classic for my birthday last year, and I only now got round to reading it. Dumas is famous for many things besides the solo circumnavigation about which this book was written. He was a big proponent of double-enders for blue water sailing. He was also an advocate of heavy displacement, but with as much of the weight in the keel as possible, to increase stability. He was against heaving-to in heavy weather, instead favoring running before the wind, which is how I found out about him: an old skipper of mine and I were having a disagreement as to whether heavy full keel boats or light fin keel boats are safer in a nasty blow, and I was advocating for the old stop-the-boat approach, while he was arguing for the planing-while-running-before-the-wind approach (which I've since come around to seeing the merits of, may I add). This was an incredibly fun and educational book to read, even if the speeds cited seem absolutely fantastically improbable. If Dumas is to be believed, he routinely dealt with winds over 40 kts, and, even more improbably, made 15 kts running downwind in the "Lehg II". This book also wins the prize for having one of the coolest double entedre titles ever: the "roaring forties" refers both to latitude South, which was the parallel that Dumas hugged through most of the circumnavigation, and the decade, the 1940s, while WWII was raging, when he undertook the trip.