Following the end of an exceedingly brief romance, Kevin Patterson found himself experiencing a bout of self-pity "histrionically out of proportion to anything that could have been justified by events". On an impulse, he bought a sailboat called the Sea Mouse and made plans to sail her from the north-west of Canada to Tahiti. The only boat he'd ever been on until then was a ferry. This work is the in turns hilarious and harrowing account of that journey. Having recruited an equally broken-hearted companion (who at least knows how to sail), Patterson sets off, seasick and slapstick, to burn away his sorrows on the open water. But as they beat their way across the Pacific, the voyage soon takes on a sharper edge. Both the literature and the reality of masculine adventure begin to pall as Patterson realizes that travel alone is not an antidote. Through anecdotes and asides, he throws his own adventure into sharp relief, and on his way home, when he finds himself sailing single-handedly across the North Pacific through a four-day gale, conscious that no one on earth has a clue where he is, the illusion that men are best tested by loneliness and adversity cracks in the forces of the wind.