Waterway Guide
While cruising and delivering boats on the East Coast, I found a great resource: Waterway Guides. These comprehensive guidebooks are essential when cruising in unfamiliar areas. They provide details about marinas, harbors, and shoreside services, including phone numbers for easy contact. Chart snippets and aerial photography with marked routes in the guides are also really helpful in unfamiliar waters. The paper guides are well-organized and easy to use. There are ten printed editions of the Waterway Guide: Bahamas, Southern, Mid-Atlantic, Chesapeake Bay, Northern, Great Lakes Volume 1, Great Lakes Volume 2, Florida Keys, Gulf Coast, and Cuba. There is also an overview guide called Cruising the Great Loop, which is helpful for pre-planning a great loop adventure.
Online, Waterway Guide has cruising news, navigation updates, up-to-date fuel prices, and an integrated planning tool called Waterway Explorer. This interactive online guide helps with trip planning, choosing appropriate marinas and anchorages along the way, and finding fuel and other services. A marina comparison feature lets you compare different marina services side-by-side. There is also information on bridges, locks, and up-to-date navigation alerts.
The Waterway Guide app allows you to receive most of the information in the online Explorer conveniently on your smartphone. The app shows marina, fuel, and service locations graphically on an overview digital chart or an overhead satellite view image is available in many areas. In-depth listings show pertinent information about these marinas and services, including reviews that can be sorted by location. The app even has a fuel price guide to help find the most reasonable fuel dock along your route, nav alerts, a skipper’s handbook, and more.
If you are cruising in one of the many areas covered by Waterway Guide, you should check out their digital offerings and buy the regional guide. The wealth of up-to-date information they offer has made many of my boating trips easier and I am confident you will find their guides and their digital offerings helpful.
