From the start of the 2,600-mile trip, from St. Martin in the Caribbean to the Azores off Portugal, things went awry--with the captain, the boat, the weather and, most precipitously, the author's state of mind. As a recreational sailor with no experience of being out of sight of land, the author's darkest fears materialized as the small crew sailed through squalls then gales and, finally, a tropical storm with near-hurricane force winds.

In Crossing, Glyn Vincent explores why he ventured into the middle of the ocean in the first place, and how he first fell in love with the sea. He describes his unsettled childhood in New York City, his parents' tabloid existence (his mother was the Broadway and television actress Betsy von Furstenberg) and the itinerant, unstable lives of his grandparents and great-grandparents, whose troubled history goes back on his mother's side to a Gothic castle in Germany and on his father's side to an orphanage in Alexandria, Egypt, and a massacre in Damascus in 1860.

In the end, this enthralling memoir is as much about the storm Vincent inherited and harbored within, as it is about the one he encountered at sea.