Three years after a near-sinking left him thirty miles offshore and a ghost in his own skin, James Howard cast off into the Bay of Biscay. There was no fanfare—just a 27-foot boat, fraying lines, and a wish made on a holed pebble.
What he found in the solitude of wind and water wasn’t a fresh start. It was a reckoning.
His gear failed. His mind frayed. The same currents that ripped weed from the seabed began to pull open wounds he’d spent years sealing.
The Pebble and The Storm isn’t about gentle tides or curated sunsets. It’s about the moment the engine dies in a squall. The voices you hear in the rigging at 3 a.m. The anchor that snags in the dark, and the lie you whisper: This will hold.
This is a running man’s journal, carved in salt and survival. A record of what happens when you sail not toward a place—but away. From failure. From numbness. From everything you once believed. And what waits in the silence when the storm passes.
Reading this book will feel like waking in a heaving hull:
- your blood pounding in your ears,
- salt spray stinging your face,
- your hands gripping a rail that has no right staying above the water.
For every sailor who knows the ocean forgives no half-measures.
For every reader who’s felt the floor vanish beneath them.
This boat is ready to depart.
If you climb aboard, you may never come back the same.
Perfect for readers of:
- Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (in the belly of solitude)
- Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way (the soul of the sea)
- Carol Diver’s Diving into Glass (uncompromising truth)
- Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path (walking—and sailing—through ruin to meaning)
Read it now. Let the water take you.
You don’t need to love this book.
But if you’ve ever tried to outrun a life, if you’ve ever looked at a boat and thought, “I wish I could sail into a new life”—this might feel like a letter already addressed to you.
The Pebble and The Storm is my solo journal from the Bay of Biscay. Not a survival guide. Not an escape fantasy.
Just a record of what the sea said back when I asked it to fix me.
