LUPERON, Dominican Republic (MMD Newswire).- Margarita Cat: Sketches of the Cruising Life by Bruce Van Sant seeks to illustrate 40 years of the people and places the author encountered and collected in ship logs and letters while traveling four continents by boat.

Van Sant hopes Margarita Cat will encourage others to discover the freedom and uniqueness of living life on the sea. "Economic disasters and social transformations drive millions to their cliffs like lemmings, but they don't have to jump," says

Van Sant. "An all-time low buyers' market exists for yachts, and that presents a low-cost life alternative. Margarita Cat documents it."

Sketches in Margarita Cat include yarns about couples, lonely professionals and retirees who attempt to escape the normalcy of their lives, only to find unlikely marriages and mischief throughout unchartered parts of the South Pacific, Mediterranean and Caribbean.

"Bruce Van Sant spent 40 years navigating in that subculture, but coming so early into it, he never really fit in with the American cruising crowd as it swelled to a movement," says Peter Swanson, a contributor to Yachting, Soundings Magazine and PassageMaker. "His apartness has given him a unique, often hilarious perspective of what happens when Middle America decides to escape by sea. Bruce's mind does not work like most of ours, so when he puts his thoughts in writing, as he has done in Margarita Cat, the result is an oddball classic in a genre of one."

Margarita Cat: Sketches of the Cruising Life is available for sale online at Amazon.com and other channels.