I was rowing out to my boat and found INDIGO his Vindo ketch on a nearby mooring. We had quite a long talk which eventually settled on the future of Cruising guides. The Taft/Rindlaub guide is like a Maine sailors bible. Or at least it was.

I recall the first time we went down the East coast to the Bahamas, we had; A Cruising Guide to Lake Champlain and the NYS Barge Canal. A Cruising Guide to the Hudson, another for New England(Duncan/Ware, still onboard), one for the Chesapeake Bay, another for the ICW, several Southern Cruising type guides(Walter Cronkite or something) and two or more to the Bahamas. On top of those, we had all the paper charts mostly in Chart kits and dozens of loose charts. To supplement the cruising guide library, we had books, mostly history of many of the areas(J. Micheners Chesapeake for instance). Except for word of mouth, print was our only source of information.

I still have my first hard back Maine Cruising Guide aboard and it's a shambles of ripped pages and a broken back, well used. Curtis doesn't mind that(I never bought an update), he's glad the originals still hold the bulk of what a cruising guide is handy for. Things don't change that much, or rather, maybe the bulk of changes that take place, can't really be kept up with in print and we accepted that some info would be out of date before the ink dried.

With what's free out there today online, Curtis wonders what the future holds for his print guide. Much of what I would buy a cruising guide for; anchorages, shore access, provision stops, fuel, are all available online now through various sources, for free. Print media's mostly losing struggle to survive has been near total carnage the last few years.

Here's his boat INDIGO, which is for sale. Beautiful boat, it's a centercockpit with a small aft cabin, but it's designed so well, it looks like an aft cockpit.