Pressure Falling – Short stories of stormy seas

Southern Oceans wreckage - the Lady Elizabeth, Falkland Islands Mark Chisnell

Pressure Falling – Short Stories of Stormy Seas Book Cover © SW

The first, 'Fastnet '79' was written for the thirtieth anniversary of that desperate race, and assesses one way in which the sailing community tried to deal with the shock of the tragedy.

There are two accounts of epic attempts to round Cape Horn in sailboats. Just over thirty years separates the Smeeton's voyage in 1959 from Bruno Peyron and Cam Lewis' 1993 Jules Verne attempt. And while they were poles apart in technology and attitude, the Southern Ocean quickly reduced them both to a raw battle for survival.

Cape Horn also features in the story of how Michel Desjoyeaux nearly lost the 2000-01 Vendee Globe to Ellen MacArthur. And the collection is completed by an analysis of the latest extraordinary research on rogue waves - and how the oceanographers finally came to accept the sea-faring community's view that there were a lot more of them out there than the scientists thought.

Pressure Falling – Short Stories of Stormy Seas is a number one Sailing book on the Amazon.co.uk paid chart.

Available for Kindle, iPad and many other eReaders from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Smashwords.com, BarnesandNoble.com, the iBookstore, Diesel eBook Store, or at Sonys Reader Store.

Mark Chisnell © Minka Firth

Writing Pressure Falling

Several of the stories in Pressure Falling began as part of a book that I pitched to publishers in 2008. The idea was to tell the best sea stories I could find from the world's various oceans and famous maritime landmarks.

Publishers and agents always want a synopsis and a chapter or three to give them an idea of what the final book will look like with these kinds of proposals. So unsurprisingly - as this is all speculative work at this stage - I picked the easiest spot on the planet for good sailing stories, Cape Horn.

I loved writing the chapter with its tales of Commodore Explorer and the Smeetons, and when the project fell through I didn't want the work to just gather electronic dust on my hard drive. So I published parts of it as a blog on my website... and didn't think much more of it.

A year or two passed and the indie eBook bandwagon began to gather steam. I had already republished my two novels and I was investigating getting some of my non-fiction into the new format. Then I remembered the Cape Horn blogs, and it seemed obvious that a short story collection was their proper home. And so began Pressure Falling – Short Stories of Stormy Seas. One day, I hope there will be a second Mark Chisnell website