Holding Fast: A Memoir of Sailing, Love, and Loss

An honest, exciting and informative journey of love, loss and adventure. I enjoyed learning about sailing and visiting various harbours vicariously. A courageous story of a relationship was also a strong point.

HOLDING FAST: A Memoir of Sailing, Love, and Loss is a beautifully captured story of leaving everything behind to embark on a life-changing adventure.Along the way, Susan delights in memories of her husband, John, and their life together. She shows us how she can take her love for what she lost and make it into something beautiful — she makes it into art. Holding Fast is a gripping sailing adventure, an inspirational memoir, and it shows the reader how this big, big love came to be.

With no experience of life at sea I read this story and fell in love with Susan Cole who chose to leave a comfortable home in Connecticut to sail to the Caribbean with her husband, John, 7-year old daughter, Kate, and a brave puppy and cat. What an adventure, throbbing with life, with stumbles, with risks and wise and honest revelations about herself and others in the family. Beautifully written too!

I enjoyed the adventure of this family - and to get know about a way of living that I had not known before. I enjoyed the author's honesty about the ups and downs of sailing and juggling work, parenting, relationships and friendships. I'm looking forward to Susan Cole's next book!

Make sure you are anchored to your chair when you read this fast-paced memoir about the complexities of a marriage that manages to hold together in a life that subsists of a hop back and forth between land and sea. Replete with vivid imagery of the sailing life and authentic sharing of how to cope with such a life, especially when it takes a drastic turn in later life, you will know when you're finished if taking on a life, as Susan so aptly describes, will ever be for you. Me? I'll keep hanging on to my anchor but thoroughly enjoyed going along on Susan's ride in my mind!