Coastal Navigation : The National Standard for Quality Sailing Instruction

by Tom Cunliffe

Intended as a companion volume to a shore-based navigation course where there are no extraneous distractions, this guide offers ground work that will give confidence in any situation on any boat.

126 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1995

About the author

Tom Cunliffe (born 1947) is a British yachting journalist, author and broadcaster.

Cunliffe has been a regular contributor to Yachting Monthly, Yachting World, Sail magazine, Classic Boat and 'Sailing Today' for many years.

A professional writer since 1986, Cunliffe has won the Best Book of the Sea award twice, for Topsail and Battleaxe and Hand, Reef and Steer.[4] He is author of the important Shell Channel Pilot for the English Channel.

In 2010 he presented the award-winning six-part BBC documentary series, The Boats that Built Britain. He also presented the popular 'Boat Yard' series for Discovery TV. He now has a big following on his Youtube channel, 'Yachts and Yarns'.

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read the 2005 version of this as part of a US Sailing Coastal Navigation course with little/no prior boat navigation experience but some prior map-and-compass navigation on land. I think the change this book needs most is a glossary. In several places references were made to terms which had not yet been defined, or which were defined in small text in sidebars rather than in the main body of the text. The "Navigational Strategy" chapter in particular was nigh-unintelligible to me and I had many questions for my instructor.

Other than those vocabulary issues, some organizational-flow issues (pages where the flow of the page proceeds through a series of images with captions, interrupting the flow of text from the previous page), and obsolete references to LORAN-C, the content was good and I felt reading this was worth my time.