Cruising Guidebooks - Mexico

Without a doubt, our favorite book while cruising in Mexico was the Sea of Cortez, A Cruiser's Guidebook - by Shawn Breeding and Heather Bansmer. We loved this book for many reasons, but primarily because of the fabulous chartlets. The charts for Mexico were terrible quality, so this guidebook made a big difference for us. When we were cruising in the Sea during the 2009/10 season, we heard that Heather and Shawn were cruising the mainland doing research for a guidebook for Mainland Mexico. I'm sure that will be equally good.

Of course, we also used Charlie's Charts for this area, and found it to be excellent also. It covered the west coast of the Baja Peninsula, which wasn't included in Heather and Shawn's book, and had some different information for some areas. Very useful.

Cruising Guidebooks - French Polynesia

We had a hard time choosing cruising guidebooks before we left. We wanted to wait until we talked with other people to find out which guidebooks were really useful, but that wasn't always possible. Luckily, we managed to pick up a wide assortment of books along the way....and this is a summary of a few of our favorites:

 

This Guide to Navigation and Tourism in French Polynesia had fabulous little chartlets, and good information for some of the areas we saw. We found it to be the most useful of all our guidebooks for this area. It wasn't completely up to date, but no guidebook can be. It didn't cover all of the atolls in the Tuomotos (after all...there are hundreds of atolls), so we had to look elsewhere for some of the atolls that we wished to visit. It was a hard book to find, not available in many marine or online stores. We lucked out and got ours from a cruiser in Mexico whose plans had changed. 

We also used the Charlie's Charts Guidebook for this area, and between the two books, we felt we had as much information as we could handle. We had several other guidebooks, including many pdf documents given to us by other cruisers, but we rarely had time to reference ALL of our sources. These two were enough. (I can't find a link to Charlie's at either Amazon or West Marine, but we bought ours at West Marine). 

We also had the above two books that we had picked up on ebay, but we didn't use them very often. Both were outdated, and had very little specific information on the anchorages that we wished to visit. There was some general info that was good pre-departure reading.

  

Of course, we also picked up a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Tahiti and French Polynesia. This gave us more background and history of the areas we visited, and more direction on what to do once we arrived at these beautiful islands.

If you have other favorite cruising guides for this area, let me know, I'd love to hear about them.

I'll compile a similar list for our favorite books during our time in Mexico.

Books, Books and more Books...

Some time ago, I mentioned that I was reading Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. I'm now finished it, and it was fabulous!! I think this has to be my favorite book that I recall reading in a very long time. Although...to be truthful, for the past couple years, I haven't read anything that isn't to do with how to sail, why to sail, when to sail, where to sail, and so on. This book was a real treat - thanks to Sooh for passing it on to me. It has made me add "Explore India" to my list of life's goals.

I also just finished reading An Embarrassment of Mangoes by Ann Vanderhoof. Betsy passed this book to us in Sausalito, and we both enjoyed this easy-to-read account of a couple's 2 year sailing interlude in the Carribean.

Now, I'm reading Lord of the Rings. Shocking, I know. I've never been tempted by fantasy fiction-witches, wizards, goblins have not caught my interest. But Steve from Narama gave this to us, and since I've not actually read any fantasy before, I thought I should at least give it a go. And since I've seen the movie...at least I have a bit of a head start. I'll let you know how it goes.