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Have gone back and forth on the rating for this one.

I like the writing. A lot, in fact. The author, Jonathan Raban, is extremely erudite and articulate, and he skillfully intertwines sailing, history, anthropology, art, and nature in a web of words in which the the reader can get lost as in the fogs and mists, eddies and currents of the waters being described.

I also like the author's premise of linking the travelogue of his journey to the exploratory sailings of the eighteenth century Spanish and English, providing a map from which frequent detours are taken only to return to the same waters. This is deftly done.

I also particularly enjoyed his musings on the culture of the native peoples before contact with the Europeans: that the water, rather than the steep, heavily forested, and largely inaccessible land, may have been their "comfort zone" and that the prevalence of lozenge shapes in their art perhaps mirrors the reflections of lights off of the wavelets of their chosen environment.

Based solely on the points addressed thus far, this would be a five-star book.

What did not work as well for me were the personal aspects of Raban's journey. And he had a lot to deal with. And perhaps it was too much, because he appears to have become completely emotionally detached from the people in his life - with the expected consequences. The sea - and its maelstroms - was surely meant to be a metaphor for his emotional state, but this was not effective for me. Perhaps the differences between life, and ruminations, on the sailboat and "reality" back on the mainland in Seattle and England are just too great, because I found these sections jarring (and the person portrayed, the author in his self-assessment, frankly, rather a prat). Or perhaps we are simply in different places in our lives, because the "author" seems to be someone with whom it would be fascinating to spend hours in a pub, letting the conversation and words flow along the detours and diversions as they may, while the author "the person", dealing with the fall-out back on dry land, seems somebody best avoided (unless you know a way to pull him out of his funk - with which he certainly was not going to let any of his family assist).

Last but not least, I would have really enjoyed a bibliography of all of the other books referenced or even alluded to in this work, because they were myriad and seem to have ranged from scholarly works to the poems of Shelley.

So, for me, five stars for the "detours and diversions" and two for the author gives three-and-a-half stars as written (which I will round to four, because I rather skimmed the "mainland" scenes). That's my world, yours may well be different. And yet I can only recommend that you dip in and dip out and move at the leisurely pace of the heavy, dark, strong waters of Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings.