CAST UP BY THE SEA

By John Skow

Reading horribilious accounts of the wet, wide and awful while remaining safe, snug and dry may be a bookworm's naughty perversion. Or call it simple good sense to do one's seafaring while seated and ashore. At any rate, in this boating season armchair mariners have an unusually good selection of chilling watery chronicles to keep them landlocked.

The most striking, and frightening, is Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm (Norton; 227 pages; $23.95). The somewhat peculiar title refers to the disastrous confluence of a large hurricane and a muscular nor'easter in the fishing grounds off New England and Newfoundland in 1991. The Andrea Gail, a 72-ft. offshore commercial swordfish boat, sank with its crew of six men in the monstrous confusion of air and water that resulted. A small sailboat, the Satori, also sank, though its crew was saved, and so did a powerful rescue helicopter that ran out of fuel, ditched and lost one crewman.

Exactly what happened to the fishing boat is not known, though the 100-ft. waves of what was called the Halloween Gale were more than enough to capsize such a boat or to pitchpole it end for end. What happened to the crew is clearer, and Junger is grimly precise about the mechanics of drowning.

What gives his narration its blood and bones, however, is the fine, boozy picture he sketches of the fishermen's bars of Gloucester, Mass., the Andrea Gail's home port. For the younger fishermen the bars are home and family in the short weeks between the monthlong voyages to the Grand Banks. They make good money, $4,000 or $5,000 a trip, and buy a lot of drinks. At the Crow's Nest Inn on the day the sinking was reported, recalls the girlfriend of one of the drowned men, "everybody was drunk 'cause that's what we do, just drinkin' and drinkin' and cryin' and drinkin'..." The book's epigraph, from Sir Walter Scott, has it right: "It's no fish ye're buying, it's men's lives."

Less somber, but still a fog-shrouded mystery of the sea, is why it is hard to love even the sleekest boat made of fiber glass, or sheet steel, or sprayed ferro-concrete. And why, if you like boats at all, it is hard not to love even a squat, stumpy and probably leaky boat made of wood. Two amiable new books about the perilous beguilement of wood boats are Sea Change, by Peter Nichols (Viking; 238 pages; $23.95) and Sailing in a Spoonful of Water, by Joe Coomer (Picador; 256 pages; $22).

The first is an alarming account, told with remarkable calmness by author Nichols, of his single-handed sail from Falmouth, England, most of the way, but not all the way, to Maine. As Nichols puts to sea in dodgy weather, the reader in his armchair considers omens (a necessary and enjoyable preliminary to the sport of reading about other people's mad adventures). Nichols is a highly experienced professional sailor, and Toad, his engineless 27-ft. sloop, is as strong and seaworthy as he and his ex-wife, whom he calls J., could make it. But now the marriage has broken up, and Nichols plans to put Toad up for sale. Before he does, he takes a farewell voyage.

Nichols is eloquent on the dangers any single-hander faces: sleeplessness, storms, illness, and the danger of being run down by a freighter highballing at 22 knots with the radar off. But it is Toad, despondent, that commits the kind of suicide possible only if your hull is made of fitted planks. Its 10-year-old caulking gives way, and slowly, reproachfully, despite days of hard pumping, it settles beneath the water, 400 miles off Bermuda, shortly after its master is rescued.

Joe Coomer is another sort of adventurer, a landsman who falls in love with a 60-year-old, 28-ft. wooden motor launch with a short mast and a steadying sail. Coomer buys the boat for a reasonable price, which is much like adopting, for a reasonable price, a child who must shortly be sent to Princeton. He names it Yonder (that's the easy part), learns to hoist anchor, percolate about the harbor, and dock again. Also to sail a bit, and what to do when the diesel fails: call for a tow, then call the diesel wizard, then deploy checkbook. After several seasons of costly maintenance, Coomer's master shipwright assumes a long face, reports rot and says the author had better decide how much he loves the boat.

A lot, it turns out; enough to fuel the writing of a book. The result is a quirky, relaxed account, as much family journal as boat biography. Coomer, who's a novelist (Kentucky Love, The Loop), has a sure way with words, as when he tells how, a new-hatched captain, he held Yonder's "taut wet anchor line in my hand as if it were the reins to the planet."