Customer Reviews

A Planning and Cruising Guide to The Great Circle Cruise Around the Eastern USA

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This cruise was clearly a grand adventure for the author, and there is rich opportunity here for a substantial guidebook. The extensive 5400-mile route does challenge the "cruising guide" format quite a bit, however, so I'm not surprised this falls a bit short of the mark. It would be a challenge to do this justice in 216 pages.

The problem is that the content consists almost entirely of light details and introductory commentary... the marinas they visited, the conditions of the waterways at the time of their passage, and so on. This material would have actually made a delightful book if it were presented as an adventure narrative, but instead it's a succession of short summaries with tabular data about the marinas (useful information, but again, it's only for the subset of marinas that the author visited, not a full cruising-guide listing).

As such, I feel this book lands somewhere in between the two extremes (adventure narrative and guidebook). This might be ideal for a reader who wants to do a similar cruise at the same general pace, and the book is peppered with useful insights and tips that can only have come from someone who has been there. But I am left with neither of a sense of the areas through which he passed (rather quickly), nor with something I can look to as a reference volume.

Still, this loop is one of the grand coastal/inland adventures, and if you're hungry for all available information on the subject this book will be a welcome addition to your nautical library. Some parts of the route are not well represented in the cruising guide market, and every bit of insight helps...

Labled as a Planning and Cruising Guide this...book (relative to others available) is very basic and is a log/diary of the authors trip. Most all of the information would be available in charts/cruising guides you would be required to use. It is statments of fact: where we stayed, descrition of facilities, log of distances covered, and brief observations on locations or traveling events. Would like to have had more pictures to appreciate/understand the situation and personal obervations, insight, recomedations. Having already experienced 1/3 of this trip already, great opportunities to inform readers were missed. In fairness it is difficult to caputure a year of your life and 6000 miles in 216 pages.

I found that the information about the trip down the east coast of Lake Michigan contained a substantial error. I have a slip in Soutn Haven and have traveled both up and down the coast from there. The distance between Holland and St Joe/ Benton Harbor is closer to 6o miles than the 41 they claimed. Makes me wonder about all the other Information