Sailing at the Edge of Disaster

In 1971, Elizabeth Garber’s domineering father announced he was sending his “problem children”—seventeen-year-old bookish Elizabeth and her fourteen-year-old brother Woodie—to a school on a sailing ship, in order to “shape up and learn to work.” Sailing at the Edge of Disaster: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Daring Year chronicles Garber’s adventures, along with the fifty teen misfits and their teacher chaperones aboard the sailing school housed on a once-magnificent yacht formerly owned by General Post heiress, socialite, and philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post. Sailing at the Edge of Disaster follows the journey of Oceanics School students and faculty as they motor the limping ship out of Miami to begin the grand itinerary their charismatic twenty-five-year-old school director envisioned. Along the way, the ship survives a gale at sea, a hole in the hull at deep water, an act of piracy, a near miss with a nuclear sub, and are held hostage by armed gunboats in Panama. The print version of the book was published by Toad Hall Editions, Northport, ME.