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Ocean Passages and Landfalls – Cruising Routes of the World; Rod Heikell & Andy O’Grady; Imray Laurie Norie & Wilson, 2005; CA 16603

To put all the title implies into a bare 200 pages sounds like a grand venture. The gestation period, we are told, has been 20 years. The well-established partnership of Imray and Heikell has once again come up trumps. Together with a wide range of input from others and with the specific expertise of Andy O’Grady to take care of the, to Rod Heikell and many of us, unfamiliar colder and high latitude waters the attractive and eminently usable new venture is successful.

It is a modular manual of significant benefit to anyone considering ocean passage making through to a circumnavigation. As you would expect, much more information than can be contained here will be necessary and guidance is given in a useful bibliography. What we have is a sectionalised range of routes across all the oceans, giving options. These may be merged in a variety of ways and will be useful at the planning stage. Each is colour indexed for ease of reference and each section follows a standard format: Weather and Seas, with notes on prevailing winds, gales, storms, currents, fog, swell, seasons; Routes and Passages, with coded optional routes: 15 in the case of the Southern Atlantic for example; Countries and Port Guides. In a work of this condensed nature, few countries show more than one port of entry. The UK is covered in 2.5 pages for example and has plans of Plymouth and Falmouth in the same format as other Imray pilots.

That is the substance of the book. The opening pages hold a series of tables of information of a more general nature: Resources for weather information, the Intertropical Convergence Zone, Tropical Storm avoidance, general marine perils and so on. Some is, perhaps, tongue in cheek. Under “Sharks” we are advised to take sensible precautions: “ such as not spearfishing with a large collection of bleeding fish hanging from the waist”

Were I travelling one or all of the oceans, I would have this at my side as an initial planning work. – PDD

Page prepared 19 October 2005