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Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

Paul Lutus (the guy who wrote AppleWriter) sailed around the world in the late 80's, solo. He wrote about it in "Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor", which is freely available online at his own personal website:

https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html

In chapter 7 he goes into his trip through the Suez Canal. Mind you, this was in the late 80's, and it didn't sound very pleasant.

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He also worked on the Space Shuttle.

Paul is a fairly prolific commenter on Reddit. Over the years there have been a few hilarious exchanges between him and some unfortunate know-it-alls on the platform.

That sounds really interesting, do you have any links?

Here's a link to am AMA he hosted, you can explore his comment history from there I guess:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/q9qzn/iama_former_nas...

None beyond the ama/username link That spare_account provided. It’s been 4-5 years at least, most of the stuff i read was about his work on the shuttle, people arguing with him about various engineering topics.

Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle[0] is also a great travel read. His style is much more scientific. But that eye for rationalism often leads to very good observations about the places he visited

Dana's Two Years Before the Mast[1] is another good voyage book. Dana is a recent Harvard grad that makes his way out round Cape Horn to California in last days of the Ranchero era. Any SV people will recognize the place names, but not the places, so to speak. His young, but refined, voice is very special on a long distance fur trading ship.

[0] http://www.myharvardclassics.com/downloads/20120213_14/downl... Free here

[1] http://www.myharvardclassics.com/downloads/20120213_8/downlo... Also free here

He's also a HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lutusp

Thank you for this. I read now Chapter 7 and this seems to be a really good book.

It really is quite good- read the whole thing :)

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