Ocean Crossing Wayfarer: To Iceland and Norway in a 16-Foot Open Dingy

by Frank and Margaret Dye (Adler Coles, 2008, first published in 1977, $10 digital)

In 2016, the average sailboat size in the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers was 55 feet, making Frank Dye’s decades of North Sea adventures in Wanderer, a 16-foot open Wayfarer dinghy, all the more amazing. “Offshore cruising in an open boat can be hard, cold, wet, lonely and occasionally miserable, but it is exhilarating too,” writes Frank Dye, of his ocean crossings. Dye faced terrible gales and capsized more than once while sailing to Iceland and Norway in his small boat.

While Frank’s wife, Margaret, often sailed with him, he usually took on crew for the ocean cruising. I had the pleasure of seeing Wanderer in the late 1980s when Dye sailed it up from Florida to Canada. The British sailor stopped in Sorrento, Maine, the little town where I have summered since I was a child and where I learned to sail myself. On our daily trip to the town dock to see what was happening, my husband and I met Dye and his impossibly small Wanderer tied up to the float.

“If you arrived by ship or aeroplane as a visitor in such places, you would remain as a stranger, watched from behind closed doors. But if you land from a 16-foot dinghy, you are immediately taken into the houses and hearts of the people and get to know them as you could probably never do otherwise,” Ian Proctor writes in the foreword to Ocean Crossing

Wayfarer. Dye did work his way quickly into our lives that summer in Maine—but then, cruisers know that that’s the nature of sailing friendships, which have to be made hard and fast in short timespans. My memory of Dye is of a short, wiry-haired man with Coke-bottle-thick glasses who took us out for a daysail. He had created a wonderful home under Wanderer’s boom tent. We took him back to our cottage and fed him lobster and strawberry shortcake, did his laundry for him, and drove him to the store to restock his supplies. He paid us back in stories—and in the sense of excitement and faraway adventure one gets from rubbing shoulders with such a person.

Ocean Crossing Wayfarer’s stories of hardship and camaraderie are well worth the read, even if you never intend to cruise in a small dinghy.