num_pages: 348
description: Working alone on a September afternoon, Gloucester, Massachusetts fisherman Mark Williams was setting back lobster pots aboard his boat f/v Black Sheep, five miles off of Good Harbor Beach where he grew up. Suddenly a trawl line cinched around his leg and within seconds he was being dragged overboard to a sure death twenty fathoms below. As he clung desperately to the stern of the Black Sheep his life literally passed before his eyes. In those pain-filled terrifying minutes he recalled his boyhood, growing up on Good Harbor Beach, the son of one-time professional football player Ted Williams, and the lessons his father taught him that would save his life. Williams lived to record the memories that filled those minutes - from a boyhood working for his father in a fish-packing plant on the Gloucester waterfront to his own career lobster-fishing alone in the North Atlantic. F/V Black Sheep is the story of that afternoon and the memories that came rushing back. Williams takes us from the violent world of the Gloucester waterfront where he once spent a summer shooting rats for the owner of Empire Fish Company through brawls with vicious men, encounters with enticing women, and the omnipresent dangers of a life lived working on the ocean. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes breath-taking, always entertaining (including a humorous recollection of an evening spent drinking with "Sully" who was to die aboard the Andrea Gail shortly afterwards) the stories that comprise F/V Black Sheep build to a heart-stopping conclusion as Williams is dragged overboard, descends to the bottom of the ocean, and a rescue so remarkable it took him years to acknowledge it.
language: English
title: F/v Black Sheep
titlecomplete: F/v Black Sheep
ratings_count: 8
publisher: Silver Perch Pr