KDP Short Read · True Story
To Ride
a Tempest
A true story from the North Atlantic.
At seventeen, C.P. Helweg was a cadet aboard a white, three-masted tall ship on the homeward leg of a circumnavigation when the ship entered a four-day hurricane.
Fifty-foot seas. A deck repeatedly buried under green water. Two sails left to fight the weather. And then the order that sent the boys aloft: Furl main topsail.
To Ride a Tempest is a compact firsthand account of the work, fear, noise, and fierce concentration of riding out a North Atlantic storm—written from a memory that never stopped moving.
There are moments when the sea stops being scenery and becomes the whole world.