(Regarding Offshore Cruising Encyclopedia)…An encyclopedia it certainly is–a wealth of information that must have taken a lifetime to collect. I enjoyed reading your book and I’m glad I made the purchase.
Criticism: 1. There are a few mistakes where you reflect imperial measurements and then the metric measurement in ( ). Assuming that the imperial measurement are correct, then the metric conversion is incorrect. I cannot remember the page numbers where the errors are. It’s insignificant really–perhaps a tiny slip of the pen? 2. You seem to have a big prejudice against multihulls and this is sad. All the text and pictures also show outdated multihulls designs and concepts. Regards, Wiets
Hi Wiets: Sorry about the mistakes. We go through three inside and two outside edits and they still creep in!
Regarding multihulls, I love them for day sailing, and for shuttling between the islands of the Caribbean, they are fine. But for long passages our feeling is that you are better off putting your money into a monohull–faster, with more heavy weather options. Multihulls only make sense to us if they are fast, and the vast majority of the cruising multihulls we see are slow–which makes them doubly dangerous in heavy weather.
Now, if you have a big cruising multi, which is kept very light, has good wing clearance, and is sailed by an experienced crew, that is a different story. But we see few multis which fit this description. Regards–Steve
Posted by Steve Dashew (November 30, 1999)
