Waterway Guide – Southern 2008 – Florida, the Gulf Coast and Bahamas

Publisher: York Associates LLC, 2nd ed.; $US 39.95
Publication Date: 2008

Dozier’s Waterway Guides are updated annually. There are four of them. This one covers almost 2000 miles ranging through the Intercoastal Waterway, the Florida Keys, Florida’s West Coast, Florida’s Upper Gulf Coast, and the remaining Gulf Coast round to Mexico. It includes the 144 mile Okeechobee Waterway cross-country from Stuart to Fort Myers which cuts short the longer route south. Each section is clearly indexed and colour-coded so reference is easy once the layout is understood. The guide starts with a chapter making the navigation of the book clear and the indexing is thorough. End covers incorporate useful page markers and the whole is strongly spirally bound so pages lay flat. It is quite chunky and includes much advertising. The whole is in full colour with charts that are generally clear – occasionally with almost too much detail to be read easily on a bucking nav. table. All have lat./long. markings. After a “Skipper’s Handbook” section which covers generally useful information about security, coast guard, weather ( including hurricanes), bridge heights, distance tables, getting mail etc., etc. the whole is divided into the sections listed above laid out in standard format. Each has a section introduction and details the way in which that section is divided into manageable stretches of waterway. An innovation last summer, was to introduce a web site: www.waterwayguide.com which claims to be simple to navigate and which aims not only to bring important updates but includes daily fuel price changes. Not only technical data is included, there are links to many coastal webcams and a forum has been set up. We are grateful to our HLR, John Chance for donating this excellent guide to the CA. – Bethan Sullivan