A Speck in the Sea

March 27, 2017
A Long Island fisherman spends 12 hours bobbing like a buoy in the Atlantic Ocean in this hair-raising true story. Childhood friends Aldridge and Sosinski, who co-own the lobster boat Anna Mary, detail their incredible story, which took place 40 miles off the coast of Montauk in the summer of 2013. The trip began just like any other, with the authors, along with third crew member Mike Migliaccio, setting out their traps aboard the 44-foot commercial fishing boat Anna Mary the evening of July 22, 2013. In the early hours of July 23, as Sosinski and Migliaccio slept, Aldridge fell overboard while recalibrating the boat’s new refrigeration system. Told from multiple viewpoints, the book takes readers into the water with Aldridge as he shares first-person accounts of shark encounters and the mind games he played while clinging to his rubber boots to stay afloat. Sections written in the third person recount the immense battle the U.S. Coast Guard, search-and-rescue aircraft, and a slew of volunteers (including singer Jimmy Buffet) waged against time to find Aldridge before the ocean claimed him. A rich backstory—including complicated personal lives and deep family histories—adds depth to this page turner.

April 15, 2017
A fishing trip turns into a very bad day in this dramatic though less fraught rejoinder to The Perfect Storm.When he fell from Anna Mary, his lobster boat, into the sea--the result, as he ruefully notes, of an avoidable bad idea--Aldridge writes that he spent some of his time in the water pondering the "if-onlys and I-should-have-dones that would have kept me from going overboard." The rest of the time he spent pondering how to keep from falling asleep and slipping into oblivion while trying to gain a fix on where he was in the water. A skilled seaman, he did so, and his knowledge as much as his strength and good physical condition was responsible for keeping him alive for the hours he was in the water. Meanwhile, as his shipmate Sosinski writes, the crew of the Anna Mary and the Coast Guard used knowledge of their own to locate that lone swimmer in the vastness of the waters off New England. Recounting a real event that took place nearly four years ago, the partners' narrative has its predictable moments, just as one might expect: the regrets, those what-ifs, etc. But, though by-the-numbers in spots, this book has several virtues. For one, like Peter Matthiessen's Men's Lives, it is a robust portrait of working-class Montauk, the Long Island community in the shadow of the tony Hamptons that always seems to be in danger of being crowded into the sea. "The real Montauk is about the fishing," they write. "It always was." For another, the authors offer a richly detailed but not overburdened view of how sea rescue operations are mounted and conducted: there are probabilities and formulas involved but also gut instinct and lots of experience in play. A capable and readable book, though the story is likely to draw its true audience by way of the forthcoming movie it ties into.

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April 15, 2017
The authors, friends since they were seven years old, were co-owners of a lobster boat, the Anna Mary. In July 2013, while they were fishing in the Atlantic off Montauk, New York, the 45-year-old Aldridge was trying to move a heavy object on the deck of the boat when he accidentally fell over the side. His partner, Sosinski, and their mate were asleep below. In minutes, Aldridge was alone in the ocean, in the middle of the night, with the frightening awareness that no one might even know he wasn't aboard the Anna Mary for several hours. He was rescued about 12 hours later, having used his boots as flotation devices. This absolutely riveting book follows the increasingly desperate (and, at times, disorganized) rescue efforts as well as Aldridge's own odyssey (How does a man facing near-certain death keep himself believing he might survive?). A movie is already in the works, but don't wait for itthe book is as captivating as any film might be.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)