num_pages: 240
description: It was an age without GPS and the Internet without high-tech monitoring and instantaneous reporting. And it was a time when women simply didnt do such things. None of this deterred Sharon Sites Adams. In June 1965 Adams made history as the first woman to sail solo from the mainland United States to Hawaii. Four years later just as Neil Armstrong very publicly stepped onto the moon the diminutive Adams alone and unobserved finally sighted Point Arguello California after seventy-four days sailing a thirty-one-foot ketch from Japan across the violent and unpredictable Pacific. She was the first woman to do so setting another world record. Inspiring and exciting Adamss memoir recounts the personal path leading to her historic a tomboy childhood in the Oregon high desert an early marriage and painful divorce and a second marriage that ended when her husband died of cancer. In the wake of his death and almost by accident Adams discovered sailing. Six weeks after her first sailing lesson she bought a boat and within eight months she set out to achieve her first world record. Pacific Lady recounts the inward journey that paralleled her sailing feats as Adams drew on every scrap of courage and navigational skill she could muster to overcome the seasickness exhaustion and loneliness that marked her harrowing crossings. 
language: English
title: Pacific Lady: The First Woman to Sail Solo across the World's Largest Ocean
publisher: University of Nebraska Press