Before they can come to terms with his loss, the boys are confronted by a huge storm. Dylan rejects his interpretation, arguing that their father must have taken a fall during the night. Dylan finds a poem on their father’s bed, which he interprets as a suicide note.

The other boys wake and search for clues as to his disappearance. In disbelief, he searches it thoroughly, though it is too small to hide anyone. One morning, Ben wakes up to find his father missing from the boat. However, the family soon becomes a well-functioning team, improving their optimism about the voyage. Ben’s father takes the role of “captain” despite his limited sailing experience, and is hard on the boys at first. As they set sail, they have a hard time getting along in the close quarters and with the added stresses of ensuring they are heading in the right direction. Ben and his brothers are skeptical that the boat is fit for a voyage to the Bahamas, but their father assures them it is fine. The boys and their father travel to Florida and acquaint themselves with their rental vessel, a slightly shoddy sailboat called the Chrysalis. Ben, Gerry, and Dylan commit to the plan reluctantly, unsure how moving away from their friends will improve their lives. He decides to take them out of school to spend a year sailing from the U.S. Meanwhile, the boys’ father tries to find a way for them all to constructively process their grief as a family. Ben has a hard time coping with losing his mother, and barely remembers the last time he was happy. The novel explores how children form different coping strategies to make sense of the loss of their loved ones, proposing that they can emerge from grief more resilient and connected than before. Ben and his brothers continue their voyage while developing different theories about the reason for their father’s disappearance. As Ben processes his grief, he clashes with his father, until he mysteriously vanishes from the boat one morning. Herlong, follows sixteen-year-old Ben Byron, who mourns the loss of his mother with his younger brothers, Gerry and Dylan, while spending a year at sea.

The great wide sea by mh herlong