When the 46-foot "Tzu Hang sailed from Australia into the vast Southern Ocean in December 1956, her crew of three couldn't know what terror awaited them. Six weeks later and several hundred miles west of Cape Horn, in the dead of night in a violent storm, they were somersaulted by a freak wave and nearly destroyed. When the boat righted itself, it was half full of water and dangerously close to sinking. Its masts had been snapped off and its deck partly ripped away. Miles Smeeton's wife, Beryl, had been flung overboard and injured but miraculously got back aboard. Somehow the crew saved the boat, survived the storm, and four weeks later reached Chile under jury rig.

Ten months later, they again attempted Cape Horn and once again were capsized, dismasted, and nearly sunk. This tale of fear and determination electrified the sailing world when first published in 1959. What keeps it as fresh and captivating now as when it was written, however, is not the fury of the storm but Miles Smeeton's spare, eloquent descriptions of life at sea. "Once Is Enough rolls with the rhythm of the ocean, and the reader, like the crew of the "Tzu Hang, is shaken from a page-turning dream by the storm's sudden violence.