Books on Sailing / Cruising

[raybrett]

Go to the sfsss site and download the free excellent book on single handed sailing. (San Fransico Singlehanded Sailing Society)

[msponer]

My three favorites are:
Tania Aebi (Maiden Voyage) made me want to go
Beth Leonard (Voyagers Handbook) helped me pick sails and make other choices
Reese Palley (There Be No Dragons) kicked my butt off the dock...

There are so many good books: Hal Roth (How to sail around the world), all of the Pardey books, the Dashew books on weather and seamanship (still a bit over my head..)..

[gjordan]

You have gotten great recommendations on the how to books ,so I will give a few books that are for pleasure and history if you (or anyone else reading this) is headed for the South Pacific. Thor Hyradahl (Fatu Hiva), A great read about the Marquesas, Also Herman Melville (Typee Vai) another interesting, but almost unknown book about the Marquesas. I was able to read both of these while in the Marquesas and they very much added to my trip. There is a book that was recommended to me ,but I was never able to locate, and I dont know the author(White Shadows In The South Seas),also about the Marquesas. I managed to read Mutiny on The Bounty while anchored in Matavai Bay,Tahiti. I could look up and see the landscape that was being written about. It was a wonderful experience . I read the rest of the Bounty Trilogy and on my next cruise plan on stopping at Pitcairn Island. When all the scary books get you down, try some of these READ THEM AND DREAM. Best of luck to you.____Grant.

[downunder]

Steve and Linda dashews books are hard to beat. Best I have seen.

SetSail


The Instant Library gives you all four books along with three DVDs plus two music CDs:

• Offshore Cruising Encyclopedia (1232 pages)
• Mariner's Weather Handbook: A Guide to Forecasting & Tactics (594 pages)
• Practical Seamanship: Essential Skills for the Modern Sailor (644 pages)
• Surviving the Storm: Coastal & Offshore Tactics (672 pages)
• Offshore Voyaging DVD Series (3 DVDs, over five hours of cruising video from all over the world)
• Music for Cruising CD
• Tradewinds High CD

[Perceh]

If you read cruising books you probably also think about writing a cruising book. That's actually the easy bit. The hard bit is getting it published and marketing it. Self publishing on the internet sounds like the solution but that's not as easy as I expected.

Amazon has a subsidiary, createspace.com, which both produces printed books and puts your ebook on Amazon. Amazon does a great job of compressing and formatting your work so that it can be read on all sorts of phones and tablets etc. But, be warned, if you have any images in your book and used something like Open Office to produce it then you can have a mess.

Another publisher , Smashwords.com publishes only ebooks but has an excellent guide for formatting to avoid most of these problems. They only accept up to 4mg files so if you do not have Word 2007 or later to compress your work they wont take it.

Another little gotcha is that if you accept an ISBN from Createspace then you will not be able to also sell your work through anyone else. And colour images will about double the price of your printed book. Go black and white and keep images above 200dpi.
But given patience you can get there. My effort is at amazon.com/dp/B00BPBKG70.

Good luck.

[Andy73]

Bumfuzzle