Full Sails Series

The Full Sails Series

Winchester Harbor ©2011, ©2013

Time Frame: Late '70s or early 80s.

Jake Lewis is at odds with his family over a girl he thought was his life partner who doesn't seem to feel that way. He doesn't know what to do except go looking for a new life somewhere else. Helping on a marina fuel dock, crewing on a Great Lakes charter fishing boat, and learning to sail help to take his mind off a cheating fiancée and his family problems, but not enough. Will the new friends he's made, including some rather special girls, help him find new direction and goals? And perhaps a new love from an unexpected quarter?

Blanche Tickle Girl Copyright by Wes Boyd ©2012, ©2014

Matt Caldwell, fresh out of college and in remission from leukemia, knows his life could be short. He wants to wring as much experience as he can from a few years off before he starts a career. On a whim as he sets sail out of Newfoundland bound for Ireland on his elderly twenty-five foot boat, he agrees to take local girl Mary O'Leary with him less than an hour after meeting her. Despite very different backgrounds, the two tend to see many things the same way. A iceberg encounter in the North Atlantic, cruising the British Isles, Norwegian fjords, the Baltic, European canals, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean are all adventures of a lifetime for both of them, despite parents and other difficulties they have to face -- but at least they can face them together.

Distant Shores Copyright by Wes Boyd ©2012, ©2015

It takes the death of his son Matt for Adam Caldwell to realize that his life is in a rut with a job and a wife that he's long since lost interest in, and he needs to change things somehow. He's not sure what he wants to do with the rest of his life, or how to go about doing it. Buying a sailboat and following in his son's footsteps seems to offer some potential for building a life he can enjoy. It's not a simple process and there are storms to face, more of them on land than at sea before he can reach the distant shores of happiness.

Rag Doll Copyright by Wes Boyd ©2013, ©2018

Amanda Lewis spends her summers working in the often exciting family business of fishing charters on Lake Huron, but her winters are cold, dull, and boring. In Florida, where it’s warm, she’s looking for a cheap boat she can live on, and her Coast Guardsman brother has found a possibility in the Rag Doll. But at first sight the boat is grubby, dirty, and needs lots of restoration, so it is a very sad Rag Doll. In better days it must have been a doll of a boat, flying the glad rags of her sails, a bone in her teeth as she sailed across bright ocean waves toward some distant, exotic destination. She could tell that this boat didn’t deserve to be sitting sad and forlorn at the edge of a swamp in a muddy backwater. There was a soul of a boat waiting to be freed from its misery. It would be a lot of work, but deep down inside she knew there could be a lot of satisfaction for doing it, too. “Yes, Rag Doll,” she said softly, “you and I are going to have some great times together.”"

Cross Reference

Chapters 1 to 20 of Rag Doll parallel chapters 28 to 34 of Distant Shores. Some events and scenes are recounted in both books from different perspectives with different levels of detail.

The Books

Title	Series number	First posted	Time frame	Bookimage
Winchester Harbor	1	April 15, 2013 - July 5, 2013	Late '70s or early 80s
Blanche Tickle Girl	2	June 30, 2014 - September 6, 2014	00's
Distant Shores	3	May 4, 2015 - July 24, 2015
Rag Doll	4	February 11, 2018 - June 7, 2018