Rory Burke and Sandra Buchanan: Managing Your Bluewater Cruise

Burke Publishing

$49.95

Review: Jane Phare*

A hoy, yachties seriously considering offshore cruising, boaties with a bookshelf on board or anyone with a large armchair, a taste for adventure but absolutely no intention of going anywhere.

Experienced bluewater cruisers Rory Burke and Sandra Buchanan have put together a must-have bible on bluewater cruising, based on their experiences on Pacific Voyager and interviews with scores of bluewater colleagues.

Managing Your Bluewater Cruise is set out in the sensible style of a manual, packed with information, lists and sound advice based on lessons hard learned. Burke has a background in management, but sticks to the book's subject. It's as important to manage the preparation, the planning, the buying of equipment, as it is to learn to sail or navigate.

Apart from that, Managing Your Bluewater Cruise is a good read and the quotes from cruisers who have been-there-done-that add to its readability.

Instead of lecturing on how to keep safe from thieves in dicey areas, Burke and Buchanan include advice direct from the yachties' mouths.

Paul (Albatross - 35ft sloop): "In English Harbour I told everyone I kept a gun under my pillow, other boats around me were broken into but not mine."

And some cool-headed advice from the authors: "The thieves are mainly looking for cash. Hide your cash in a number of places, so if held at knifepoint you can point to a small amount."

And sprinkled among the chapter of advice on heavy-weather sailing are comments which will make any armchair sailor put the recliner into the upright position.

George and Barbara (Pilot), featured in the book Rescue in the Pacific: "It was not the four-storey-high waves that made my heart pound but the enormous crests rolling over them to form the tubes that surfers look for."

There's plenty of useful advice for sailors who might never go further than the Great Barrier or the Bay of Islands on a long holiday cruise. Debates on anchoring techniques, anchors themselves, dinghies, how to keep fruit, vegetables and eggs in good condition, how to handle rough weather, safety precautions, sails, reefing and navigation.

And there are all those fascinating little knowledge morsels you can store away - like the fact that soda crystals dissolved in hot water help dissolve the build-up in sink pipes.

Burke and Buchanan don't pretend to be the last word on bluewater cruising and throughout their book are lists of other recommended reading on various subjects.

The book list at the back runs to four pages.

A tidbit that's not in the book: Burke and Buchanan started out as sailing partners, became engaged as they crossed the equator between Panama and Galapagos dressed as Neptune and a mermaid, and were married last year.

* Jane Phare co-authored with John Glennie The Spirit of Rose-Noelle, 119 Days Adrift: A Survival Story.