Book Description
I'm known as Bob423 in postings on Active Captain and this is the third edition of my ICW Cruising Guide. The focus of this guide is to aid the boater in safely navigating the 120 or so shallow areas of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) with full-page color charts for each hazard and directions for safe passage. The guide is not a complete compendium of all marinas and anchorages; there are plenty of other guides for that. However, it does include the marinas and anchorages we've found spaced conveniently for ICW travel and where there's pet relief easily available. Also included are lists of how to get ready for the trip and tips on making life more enjoyable on the waterway. For the 2017 edition, the charts have been enlarged to show better detail and buoys now have their own labels (G3, R4, etc.) in larger type for easy reading. Where not obvious, the charts have a yellow line showing the deepest water I found during my trip north in the spring of 2017. Each chart has a mile marker location. All of the information on finding the deepest route through a hazard is from my personal experiences in seven years of cruising the ICW, which was updated on my spring trip north in 2017. Nothing is secondhand except I did include several hydrographic charts from Wilmington and Charleston ACOE where available to aid in transiting the worse of the shallow areas. This year I have included waypoints for many of the most difficult areas such as Hell Gate, Fernandina, Jekyll Creek and a few others. It can be very tedious manually entering the waypoints not to mention being error prone so I've posted the waypoints as GPX files on my blog site at fleetwing.blogspot.com in the ICW Tips section. Since I use an iPad, I've also included instructions on how to transfer the GPX routes to the iPad for the Garmin Mobile app. Once loaded, you will be following the same route I used in finding the depths I recorded in the spring of 2017. There will be one GPX route that contains all GPX routes in the guide. When loaded into the Garmin iPad app, each hazard route will be displayed individually just as if each had been loaded by themselves. I'll keep the routes updated as I progress down the ICW this fall. Just look on the blog site under ICW Tips for the GPX Routes link for the latest routes. The advice section has been updated and expanded with the latest iPad apps and links in the ebook version have been checked to be sure they work. Many of the advice comments didn't change, after all there's a base level of things to do that does not change year to year but there are still updates with additional experiences. Thank you for considering the purchase of the guide. The links have been left in blue with an underline. I've posted the active links on my blog page at fleetwing.blogspot.com in the ICW Tips section so you don't have to google anything, just find the link in the list and click. If you purchased the book then the ebook version is free on Amazon.com. Please leave a review on Amazon.com, all reviews are helpful to other boaters considering a trip down the ICW. Bob423, aka Robert and Ann Sherer