Awakening during Pacific Coast Solo Sail

Here is the book for those who have dreamed of sailing the seas alone to experience the spirit of adventure and learn some of life’s most important lessons.

Imperfect Calm: Loneliness and the Voyage Home, takes you along with sailor/author Clyde L. Lovett as he sails unaided for six months down the coast from San Francisco, around Mexico, through the Panama Canal, and to Florida by way of the farthest reaches of his soul.

In this sensitive account of one man’s quest to reconcile his past and make sense of his present, Lovett shares the loss and longing of becoming an orphan at an early age–and how the oceans were always his one peace.

"As my mother was leaving the world in my eighth year of life, I began to write. And so did my writing follow her and my father to heaven, forever searching, trying to reconnect," proclaims Lovett, whose solo mission punctuated a career of seventeen years as Captain of Ocean going yachts on and across the North Atlantic, Caribbean Sea, and the North and South Pacific.

In Imperfect Calm Lovett lamentably notes that neither an adventurous lifestyle nor the love of family was ever quite enough. So in January of 1992, with a heavy heart, he flies from his home in Boston to San Francisco, sadly leaving behind his wife to retrieve the other lady of his life: the 31-foot sailboat Renaissance. He lovingly puts her back into shipshape, all the while contemplating the enormity of his planned voyage.

"Giving and receiving are a circle: I am the giver and receiver. On my trip, I alone care for me. I am parent, mother, father…the voyage takes on the metaphor of a voyage into death, as in numbness there is no life," observes Lovett, who studied writing between permanent positions at sea, and now practices his craft from his current home in Colorado.

Although he vacillated between sailing and selling his 31-foot sailboat Renaissance, his deeper urges prevail and Lovett decides he must sail it if he is ever to reconnect with all that is important. As the great Pacific opens before him he soothes his soul by befriending sea creatures–"The dolphins guide me, care for me. I sleep better in their care."

Adventure per se was not what Lovett was seeking; however, it found him. While sailing toward Mexico he is spun into reflection over the fear generated in others surrounding the renowned Point Conception. Then he follows a trail of coconuts and floating sea turtles along the Mexican coast, voyages with a couple who is fleeing a encounter with banditos, muses upon a raging fire in Costa Rica, survives the temptation-laden passage through the Panama Canal, all the while, processing it into metaphor, raising two dimensional experience into three dimensional understanding.

After he adopts a parrot for companionship from a 100-year-old Chief on a Caribbean Island, and the voyage nears its end, the goal of spiritual connection is finally within grasp–the final steps are further challenged by realities of his world, near misses with larger vessels and mechanical failure, but he can not succumb to the distractions, the drive to heal himself intensifies, and reconnection becomes an intense requisite for survival.

While the exotic setting and encounters might be foreign, the themes addressed in Imperfect Calm–loss, loneliness, temptation, longing for acceptance–are universal in our lives. How one man sets sail for the farthest shore and finds himself in the process is something to which even landlubbers can relate. Don’t miss a page of this captivating pilgrimage!

Imperfect Calm: Loneliness and the Voyage Home. by Clyde L. Lovett.
$14.95 original trade paperback,

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