In Beyond Endurance, Toronto journalist Adam Mayers tells the story of the 1979 Fastnet race, the worst tragedy in ocean racing history, through the experiences of the crews of four Canadian boats.

The storm that hit the 303 competitors in the race was unexpected and unusually violent. Near-hurricane-force winds and towering waves wrecked five boats and forced crews to abandon another 19. One hundred and thirty-six people had to be rescued in atrocious conditions and 15 died. Of the Canadian boats, only one completed the course.

Mayers uses his journalistic skills to give the reader a vivid sense of what it must have been like battling for survival in a small boat at the mercy of the raging elements. Occasionally, the prose is overdone – one sailor is described as having “legs like tree stumps” and “arms like braided steel wire” – but, overall, the style is not too invasive.

The main difficulty with Beyond Endurance is that, in concentrating on the Canadian boats, Mayers misses one of the major elements of the story. There is excitement and drama, but we know from the beginning that all the Canadians survived the race. The tragedies that made Fastnet 1979 so awful fall largely outside the scope of the book. A late chapter catalogues what happened to the boats that lost crew members, but that merely serves to disrupt the story’s flow, and the tragic incidents are so crammed together that much of their poignancy is lost.

The most intriguing aspect touched on in Beyond Endurance is the psychology of why the crews often kept sailing into the teeth of the storm. One contestant, despite his near-death experience, says that his biggest fear today is that he “will never see anything as beautiful as that again.”