Katherine Grainger is not only Great Britain's finest ever woman rower, but also she has won more Olympic medals than any other female British athlete in any sport. At Rio de Janeiro in the 2016 Olympic Games, at the age of 40, and less than two years after coming out of 'retirement', with a different partner, she came within one second of retaining her women's Double Sculls gold medal. On 3 August 2012, on the water at Eton Dorney in the London 2012 Olympic Games, she - and Anna Watkins - had rowed to glory in the women's Double Sculls. Three times an Olympic silver medallist, she could finally hang up her oars as an Olympic champion to add to her six World Championships and eight World Cup gold medals - but she didn't. Katherine's story is a remarkable one - proof that nice people can be winners and dedication and hard work pay off. Incredibly bright, Grainger combined her athletic career with her education and she has degrees from Glasgow and Edinburgh universities and a PhD from London, in subjects as diverse as law, philosophy and homicide. No wonder she is so much in demand as a motivational speaker. Katherine Grainger: The Autobiography continues her inspirational story taking in her post-London activities, the return to training, finding a new double sculls partner in Vicky Thornley, the highs and lows of their attempt to qualify for Rio 2016 and eventually their astonishing row to another silver medal.

This is not your parents' Art and Science of Sails, written by Tom Whidden and Michael Levitt and published in 1990 by St. Martin's Press. The first edition sold more than 20,000 copies. The Second Revised Edition 2016 -- now in its second printing -- is published by North Sails Group, LLC and written by the same duo. What a difference 25 years makes! Today there are one-piece sails made over a 3D mold in the shape they will assume in the wind. Sail plans have radically evolved to fractional rigs, fat-head mains, and non-overlapping jibs. That is true for racing boats as well as cruising. Thus, ninety percent of the text is new, as are almost all of the more than 100 photographs and technical illustrations. The authors focus on circulation as they did in the first edition, but now come at it from a different direction. And for the first time anywhere, they attempt to quantify its effects. Where the wind speeds up and why as it passes over a sail plan, and where it slows down and why. Circulation theory is familiar to aerodynamicists for at least 100 years and is argued about by sailors at least since 1973, when the late Arvel Gentry loosed his theories on the sailing world. Gentry was an aerodynamicist at Boeing by day and a sailor on the weekends. And the theories used to explain why airplanes fly were at odds with the theories of why sailboats sail to weather and what the slot actually does. Whidden, CEO of North Marine Group, which includes North Sails, and Levitt, who has written 14 books, utilize explanations like circulation to answer such diverse questions as: Why fractional rigs, fat-head mains, and non-overlapping jibs have come to predominate. Why and how leech twist can be a sail-trimmer's best friend. Why a yacht designer positions the mast, keel, and rudder to create some weather helm. Why the safe-leeward position is advantageous relative to the entire fleet, not just to the boat you tacked beneath and forward of. Why a mainsail's efficiency is improved with added upper roach, beyond the value of the extra area. Why the miracle of upwind sailing is not that there is so much lift but so little drag. Why, when sailing upwind, the main is always trimmed to a tighter angle than the jib. What a polar diagram tells us or why tacking downwind is almost always faster than sailing directly to a mark. There is also an in-depth look at the wonders of material utilizationnot just materials. Indeed there have been no new fibers accepted into sailmaking for over 20 years. It is how they are used that makes the difference. In the last three chapters, the authors drill down on mainsails, headsails, and downwind asymmetric and symmetric spinnakers. And in this edition for the first time they address downwind aerodynamics. The book celebrates the complexity and beauty of sails in words and pictures and of the whole rarefied sport of sailing.

Not many 'amateur' yacht designers would dare to enter the first boat they had ever designed into the epic offshore Fastnet Race, let alone with the intention of winning it. But that is what Dick Carter did in 1964, beating all 151 other yachts, some sailed by the most notable sailors of the day. He repeated the feat 4 years later with another of his own designs (which also won the Admiral's Cup that year as top boat and top team), but by then he could certainly not be described as an 'amateur' yacht designer. His radical innovations created fast and comfortable boats which were much in demand in this, the golden age of offshore racing. They were commissioned by the top sailors and succeeded in winning the Admiral's Cup, Southern Cross Series, One Ton Cup, Two Ton Cup and many of the biggest races. He even went on to design the massive 128-foot Vendredi Treize for Jean-Yves Terlain to sail single-handed in the 1972 OSTAR (trans-Atlantic) race - the longest boat ever to have been raced single-handed. But after just a decade at the top of his game, he quit the world of sailing and moved on to other challenges. He hadn't been heard of for so long that sailors assumed he was dead. His surprise appearance at the funeral of Ted Hood gave rise to the suggestion that he wrote this book. It is beautifully produced with many fabulous photographs and boat plans and was first published in the US by Seapoint Books and is now published in the UK by Fernhurst Books. While his career as a yacht designer may have been brief, the impact of his innovations has lasted the test of time. Who today would think of an offshore yacht without internal halyards in the mast or that the rudder always had to be fixed to the keel? These concepts, and many more, were first introduced by Dick Carter.

Even as a teenager, John Beattie felt drawn to the ocean, but it was twenty-five years before his dreams of sailing the globe in his 35-foot yacht Warrior Queen could begin to come true. His voyage began in England and continued to the South American coast and into the depths of the rain forests via uncharted tributaries. The adventure reached a stirring climax during his return voyage from Venezuela. One day at dawn, hundreds of miles from land, he spotted a man dying of thirst aboard a drifting open boat, a man given one last slender chance to live.

In August 1998 Kim Trevathan summoned his beloved 45-pound German shepherd mix, Jasper, and paddled a canoe down the Tennessee River, an adventure chronicled in Paddling the Tennessee River: A Voyage on Easy Water. Twenty years later, in Against the Current: Paddling Upstream on the Tennessee River, he invites readers on a voyage of light-hearted rumination about time, memory, and change as he paddles the same river in the same boat-but this time going upstream, starting out in early spring instead of late summer. In sparkling prose, Trevathan describes the life of the river before and after the dams, the sometimes daunting condition of its environment, its banks' host of evolving communities-and also the joys and follies of having a new puppy, 65-pound Maggie, for a shipmate. Trevathan discusses the Tennessee River's varied contributions to the cultures that hug its waterway (Kentuckians refer to it as a lake, but Tennesseans call it a river), and the writer's intimate style proves a perfect lens for the passageway from Kentucky to Tennessee to Alabama and back to Tennessee. In choice observations and chance encounters along the route, Trevathan uncovers meaningful differences among the Tennessee Valley's people-and not a few differences in himself, now an older, wiser adventurer. Whether he is struggling to calm his land-loving companion, confronting his body's newfound aches and pains, craving a hard-to-find cheeseburger, or scouting for a safe place to camp for the night, Trevathan perseveres in his quest to reacquaint himself with the river and to discover new things about it. And, owing to his masterful sense of detail, cadence, and narrative craft, Trevathan keeps the reader at the heart of the journey. The Tennessee River is a remarkable landmark, and this text exhibits its past and present qualities with a perspective only Trevathan can provide.

This volume reveals the wisdom we can learn from sailing, a sport that pits human skills against the elements, tests the mettle and is a rich source of valuable lessons in life. * Unravels the philosophical mysteries behind one of the oldest organized human activities * Features contributions from philosophers and academics as well as from sailors themselves * Enriches appreciation of the sport by probing its meaning and value * Brings to life the many applications of philosophy to sailing and the profound lessons it can teach us * A thought-provoking read for sailors and philosophers alike