John Haslett's account of a decade of sailing balsa rafts, Voyage of the Manteño, was published by St. Martin's Press in Fall 2006, and excerpted in National Geographic Adventure's annual Best of Adventure issue. You can purchase it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BooksaMillion, Borders, and many other online retailers.

You can listen to a short radio program John did for public radio here, and you can see a video of the Manteņo Expedition's first raft sailing on the open sea on the following YouTube clip:

You can keep up with John on his blog.

'You won't be able to put it down.' -- National Geographic Adventure

'...harrowing, grueling, breathtaking... to describe Voyage of the Manteņo, the word riveting works best.' Wend

'Haslett's prose vibrates with energy...(he) makes you feel the lash of the sail and hear breakers exploding on rocks...This is a loud, insistently physical read...' -- San Francisco Chronicle

'Haslett's two most important characters are the sea and the raft, and they come alive on almost every page. In a age when even Mt. Everest and the South Pole have been domesticated, Haslett offers all the romance of an old-fashioned sea tale.' -- Publisher's Weekly

'I am being consumed by it. (Haslett) has a way with words that is very rareŠ' -- Joe Iurato, Editor-in-Chief, Urban Climber

'Beautifully written...' -- Dallas Morning News

'Haslett has beautifully combined the expeditionary toughness of Earnest Shackelton and the cutting prose of Ernest Hemingway...(a) classic of adventure.' -- Peter Capelotti, PhD, Author of 'Sea Drift' (Rutgers University Press)

'Reading about Haslett's adventures has blown me away.' -- Dianne Fanning, Author of 'Through the Window' (St. Martin's Press)

Excerpts

A raft made of massive logs tied together with hemp rope, topped with a two-story bamboo hut-a sixty-foot-long micro-city...We were completely isolated now. Everything thing of the earth was gone, the peoples, the conflicts, the commerce, all of it, and our all of our attentions and thoughts turned inward. Our entire relationship with Reality was suddenly reduced to two ideas: the raft, and the ocean.

...

There were so many hundreds of sharks that the waters around the raft seemed to squirm with gray bodies.

...

He stood and watched; he was speechless. In the last hour a storm had ripped apart our anchor, another vessel had collided with us and sunk, and our dinghy had been destroyed by the biggest waves that he had ever seen.

...

We stood and looked out across the vast Pacific Ocean. We stared blankly, hopelessly. Our mouths hung open, making us look hungry, tired, despondent. We were the loneliest people on earth-four, haggard, weakened men, marooned on a wooden island.