Plying the waters, by boat, map, and memory

By Daniel Robb
Simon & Schuster, 317 pp., illustrated, $25

By Mark Monmonier
University of Chicago, 224 pp., illustrated, $25

Written by Catherine Schmitt
Illustrated by Kimberleigh Martul-March and Margaret Campbell
Tilbury House, 250 pp., illustrated, paperback, $20

Daniel Robb didn't get in the water - that's boatyard-speak for launching the boat - until the last Monday of August a few years back.

He couldn't get in much sooner because work on his family's nearly 70-year-old Herreshoff 12 1/2 turned out to be much more extensive than he'd anticipated, as he explains in "Sloop." Robb's rigorously stem-to-stern, topsides-to-keel account of restoring Daphie, a classic wooden sailboat that he, and his parents before him, had sailed and raced in Buzzards Bay, is one of three books about coastal New England appearing when it's still time to get in the water.

Robb, who lives spartanly in an old cottage in Woods Hole, began musing about restoring Daphie - and writing about it - as he was working on his cousin's roof across the bay in Marion. The boat hadn't been in the water in a good 10 years, and when Robb does get started, it's an 18-month project, with some time out for a paying job or two. And, he writes, for "taking the opportunity to get nothing done for a while (something that experience has shown is a big part of boatbuilding)."

At one point, he seeks out local boatbuilder Giff Hogarth for some advice on what to do with the transom, the mahogany stern, "that was coming a little apart."

Hogarth's patch-it-up advice is to cut away the bad wood and replace it. It will "look a little beat, but it'll hold things together. . . . Unless you've got a shed full of dough and you're aiming for perfection," says Hogarth, "that'll get the boat sailing as well as anything."

And through such boatyard encounters, the reader is introduced to the Herreshoff legacy, the classic boats designed or built by Nathanael Herreshoff and his son L. Francis Herreshoff - the solid, sea-friendly 12 1/2s, the spanking racing sloops, and all the America's Cup defenders from 1893 to 1934.

And yes, Daphie is finally "in the water," in Quissett Harbor, late in the second August of its restoration.

There follow three days of pumping out until the seams seal up, and then Robb is off for a shakedown sail, making "good time on the fresh breeze, going tack on tack across Gansett Bight," then finally coming slowly into what he and local sailors regard as "a holy place," Hadley's Harbor, on the tip of Naushon Island.

Robb "hauls out" in November, promising "to put her in the water a little earlier next year, if everything works out."

Buzzards Bay, with its shoals and tidal currents, requires some careful navigation - and that means charts, the subject of geographer Mark Monmonier's "Coast Lines."

The coastline, he writes, "is a shoo-in for first place" among mapped features, because while "the sea provides food, transportation, and recreation, the shoreline is at once a boundary, an attraction, a source of livelihood, and a hazard."

Monmonier identifies several distinct features of coastal cartography. The high-water line visible from offshore and the low-water line are both important for safe navigation. The storm-surge line and the inundation line, however, reflect "a growing awareness . . . that densely populated shorelines pose a risk to life and property."

As with his previous books on the art and science of mapping, Monmonier comes up with an intriguing case study. Here, it is the "missing" fifth island on charts of waters around the small village of Five Islands, on Maine's Lower Sheepscot River.

Charts clearly name four islands sheltering the small harbor. To find the "missing" fifth, Monmonier examines charts dating back to the mid-19th century and modern ones based on aerial imagery.

His conclusion is that to residents of Five Islands, the "five" reflected the number of islands "readily visible from the dock."

The natural cycle of a year along the New England coast from Cape Cod to Canada is handsomely detailed in "A Coastal Companion," by Catherine Schmitt of the Maine Sea Grant Program, with atmospheric illustrations by Kimberleigh Martul-March and Margaret Campbell.

In day-by-day entries, they record the arrivals and departures of migrating shorebirds and the seasonal appearance of fish in coastal waters, and all the other natural phenomena that remain a source of wonder.

Here's the entry for Aug. 19: "Like beachcombing, tide-pooling is an activity in which we go down to the water's edge to see what we can see. The great thing about both is that the experience is never the same twice. . . . By what chance does one pool fill with inflated green algae and the other with clumps of brown moss animals? . . . The longer you look, the more you see. Suddenly, the tide pool becomes an entire ocean, an ecosystem unto itself, until a sea gull's cry interrupts your trance and you look up, the moment erased by the brilliant sun glaring off the rocks."

Michael Kenney, a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge, reviews books of local and regional interest.