Oh my gosh- what a great adventure read combined with often difficult family dynamics! A mother, a father , a 14 year old boy and an 11 year old girl sail around the world for 5 years with not enough money and a 30 ft boat in bad shape. What could go wrong? Especially with truculent teenagers who don't want to go! Yes,there is some humour here but there is more danger and general unpleasantness. Still, although foolhardy indeed, a good and entertaining book has come out of the whole experience.

Thank you to Net galley for the ARC for my honest opinion.

Ms. Hinman has done a very good job of relating the adventures experienced by her husband's family as they embark on their journey around the world. Many times I wanted to put down this book to make the hardships stop for this family, but kept going as I was hoping for that happy ending. Though they made it home eventually, it was hard to read about the rifts created within the family structure at the end.

Have you ever dreamed of giving up your job and "running away", letting the kids leave the school room for a year?

And, love to sail.......sail around the world? If so, this is the book for you. Travel with is family, on their sail boat as they survive an ocean storm, become stranded on an island. Learn island customs, repairing a sail boat, experience the beauty of the night sky and Mother, Father and teenage son and daughter learn about pulling together as a family. Good armchair read.

***** I give this Book a Five Star Review. I would recommend this Book. Thanks NetGalley.

From the title of the book, I thought this tale was going to be humerous but it was more like one bad experience after another. Its about of four decide to spend four years sailing around the world with unrealistic and two whining teenagers. The sailboat they are on is not made to handle the trip, and they are inexperienced sailers to be traveling these distances. All I can say is, what were you thinking?

I'm a huge fan of anything realistic and this book really made me feel as if I were a part of the action. I was in awe of the bravery and recollection of the author and am looking forward to other works.

It’s probably best not to try to describe the Wilcox family. Simply put there’s a father, Chuck, a mother, Dawn, a son, Garth, and a daughter, Linda. They put to sea in a 40-foot sailboat and spend from 1973 to 1978 sailing around the world. The kids were young, Garth was fourteen and Linda was eleven, not exactly the age when ugly sights and terrifying adventures would be suffered happily; Linda didn’t want to go at all. But their story is fascinating and has been captured by an adventurer in her own right, Wendy Hinman.

Hinman, married to the adult son, Garth, has put together a biography of the trip in “Sea Trials,” the details of which she harvested from many sources. The voyagers kept logs, took pictures, and wrote lengthy letters to relatives back home and, of course, were eager to share their undertaking through later interviews. Hinman, being part of the family, had the chance every writer yearns for; having the source material close at hand. Through the years the news outlets have pursued them for details of their ordeal and that information is also available to sift through.

The trick here is to gather all that stuff and put it into a form that’s readable, interesting, thrill producing, and enthralling. Hinman does that with great skill.
Five years of nerve wracking exposure to hazardous conditions at sea, the abominable grit of poverty stricken lands, hunger and thirst that cannot always be satiated, the ever present specter of injury or death, and close confinement during stressful periods have all been captured here. The constant breaking down of necessary equipment, the unavailability of certain supplies, especially food and water, the lack of current technology at the time of their voyage, family friction and stress as things always seem to be threatening, and the hard physical labor of keeping an old boat working is truly eye-opening.

Chuck gets increasingly depressed and less industrious. Dawn is totally immersed with manual labor and has some health scares. Linda’s moods are mercurial, keeping family relationships fractious. Garth, although totally occupied with his own urges, is probably the real hero here, capable and steady with great intuitions. The author is not shy about putting it all out there for the reader to study.

As a former sailor, I can tell you my desires to sail around the world, if I ever had any, no longer clutter my mind. My thanks and admiration go out to the Wilcox family for satisfying my curiosity about the adventure of world sailing and to Wendy Hinman for stepping on any ambitions I might have had. This is a must read.

Wendy Hinman's "Sea Trials" offers an unabashed look at what it takes to bring a young family on a multi-year around-the-world adventure on a shoestring budget. The Wilcox family is not your typical yacht-cruising millionaire set. They are an ordinary middle-class family who scrimped and saved years for the best boat they could afford and set off in fact without any prior sea-faring experience outside the calm of San Francisco bay. The story starts off in the middle, a chaotic, life-threatening, nighttime shipwreck on a reef as a flashback and then proceeds linearly from there forwards. The amazing story of how they rebuild and move on after that is just one of a dozen high-stakes adventures in this book.

Of course, no five-year travel book is going to be a page-turner from start to finish. Inevitably, the doldrums set in: a predictable rhythm of equipment failures, improvised repair, dealing with immigration, shopping, exploring the locale, and then back to sea, over and over and over. There is in fact a litany of repetitive complaints mostly about the problems of trying to put children through correspondence school, the unreliability of international mail, money problems, dealing with crooked officials with their hand out, and so on. Interspersed with this are a few snippets of local history for the various ports of call. You get the impression that sailing is a lot like air traffic control, hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. The last few chapters are truly hair-raising as one-by-one systems fail on the last 1500 miles: engine, rigging, and even food.

My main criticism of the book is that it doesn't maintain a point-of-view. It is always bouncing between the four family members thoughts and feelings which I felt hampered continuity. The overall effect is a narrative more like a reality TV show than a novel. I would have preferred to have an entire chapter from one person's point-of-view so I could really get a feel for them as a person. Garth, the teenage son and wife of this book's author would have been an ideal protagonist if the entire book had been portrayed from his POV. That being said, it does help that we get to experience waves of panic, despair, and even depression that sweeps through the parents lives like swells in a rough sea.

Sea Trails is a unique story of a family who doubles-down on adventure, refusing to quit even in the face of insurmountable problems that will stretch them to the limit physically and psychically.. Reading this book will renew your belief in the spirit of America's pioneering families and a can-do attitude that makes us who we are.