Cruising Guide to Eastern Florida

The guide starts in Georgia and runs through to Miami. It covers the Intracoastal Waterway. Each of eleven chapters details anchorages, marinas and shoreside facilities. They include depths at entrances and at in marinas. Notes include whether or not they accept transients, together with interesting reference to episodes of local history. We are told that charges for transients are expensive. The latter part of each chapter is navigational information for the anchorages covered in that chapter. General advice includes the warning that 6-7 foot tides seriously affect the viability of some channels even though the Eastern coast has, by and large, greater depths than the West. It is worth also noting that you are here in the hurricane belt and this may affect facilities available at marinas. This edition was so affected as it went to print and emphasises the need to ensure updated information is considered before travelling. At the start of each we have a list of the relevant NOAA charts. Significant changes are noted in a regular newsletter The Salty Southeast. There are black and white photos and many sketches to show anchorages, harbours, town layouts and so on, all printed on relatively coarse paper. The fact that they are monochrome makes the ones put in to break up text rather than to be of navigational importance lose their impact. Those more relevant are placed well relative to the text for ease of use. The volume is no pocket book at 3.5cms in a format of 23.5 x 20cms. But we know of no better basis for pre-planning nor pilot for use on board this area that, we are told, is “the most diverse of any state’s coastline in all of America”. Claiborne S Young is acknowledged as an cruising sailor with many published works both of general cruising wisdom and particularly of wide areas of the coastal waters of Florida, the Northern Gulf Coast, Northern Carolina . – Michael Davey