Book tells sailing family’s heartbreaking story of love and loss
Driving around running errands today, I heard a story on KUOW that kept me sitting in my car, riveted, until it was over. Reporter Jeremy Richards interviewed author Hester Rumberg about her book “Ten Degrees of Reckoning: The True Story of a Family’s Love and the Will to Survive.” The book tells the tragic story of the Sleavin family from Tacoma, who set out in 1993 to realize their dream of sailing around the world.
Judith and Michael Sleavin and their two children were three years into their circumnavigation when one night off the coast of New Zealand, a freighter altered its course by 10 degrees and smashed into the Sleavin’s 47-foot boat. Michael, 42, 9-year-old Benjamin and Anna, 7, drowned. After clinging to a dinghy for 44 hours, Judith, suffering a broken back and paralyzed below the waist, was rescued. Doctors later said she had one of the worst cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome ever documented.
Judith never talked to the press about her ordeal but 12 years later, asked her best friend, Rumberg, a Seattle-based oral and maxillofacial radiologist, to write what was too agonizing for her to write herself. Amazon describes Rumberg’s chronicle as “a stunning account of survival, a meditation on the strength of friendship and community.” I’m not sure I can bring myself to read what is surely a wrenching tale, but it got overwhelmingly rave reviews from readers on Amazon.
Audio from the KUOW interview unfortunately wasn’t available at the time of this post, but I’m hoping it will be later. The interview is extraordinarly compelling, detailing not just Judith Sleavin’s tragedy but also its impact on Rumberg, her perspective on sailing and ultimately, her own marriage.
Rumberg will be reading from Ten Degrees of Reckoning tonight at 6:30 at Third Place Books in Seattle, and at 7:30 Monday, April 6, at Powell’s Books in Portland.
