Sell up & Cruise the Inland Waterways

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17325
Cooper, Bill and Cooper, Laurel
Book
9780713679885
Adlard Coles Nautical
2010
200
1
N1
Missing
Review Date: 
26/08/2010

Sell up and CruisePrice: £16.99

The concept of 'selling up and . . .' has been rehearsed by several writers including the authors of this book in one of their earlier works.  Here, by introduction, they refer to that title and commend it to the reader; this becoming a neat marketing 'plug'.  Despite a curiously dismissive beginning in which they do not propose to go 'deeply into the psychology of cruising', this book quickly becomes an encyclopaedic treatise on taking live-aboard boats onto inland waters worldwide.  The Coopers have a formidable professional and lifestyle background of handling and living with small vessels in these surroundings.  Although the focus is on European waterways, the geographic range of the work is worldwide including advisory notes on China (might become possible), by way of Egypt (not really recommended) to the Intracoastal Waterway of the USA. Similarly, the business of buying, fitting out and managing suitable boats is covered in authoritative detail together with such topics as inland waterway systems and lock engineering. The work even concludes with a discussion on making sea crossings by inland-bound vessels. The tone is forthrightly solemn – it is a textbook, after all – but nicely leavened by a series of quite charming 'waterway interludes' drawn from the authors' own voyaging, together with evocative in-text line drawings and photographic illustration, many showing the building of their self-design boat, Faraway. All-in-all, a book for the planner of serious intent, and is perhaps definitive in its present-day genre.  Edward Cartner


 

 

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