we called them “enriched” guides because we wanted to include more than just the “mileposts and signposts” of transiting from one port to another.

When we cruised, we most enjoyed the learning experiences along the way. Although we were busy piloting, we were curious about the stories ...Read more]]>

When my husband Mark and I started writing cruising guides,

we called them “enriched” guides because we wanted to include more than just the “mileposts and signposts” of transiting from one port to another.

When we cruised, we most enjoyed the learning experiences along the way. Although we were busy piloting, we were curious about the stories behind the island’s names, the birds and plants we were seeing, and the local history. But the existing guides didn’t fill in enough details. And I couldn’t tote along enough field guides, nature books, and regional history reading to cover the miles!

Interpretive vignette from “Managing the Waterway” (Mule Key to Loggerhead Key)

So when we started our series, although they are first and foremost navigation books, we decided to include what we called “interpretive vignettes”: short but detailed background reading on the sights, sounds, and stories along the way.

• What marine animal makes that crackling noise under the hull at night?
• What causes bioluminescence?
• How can a large pelican hit the water at such high speeds?
• How far can a flying fish fly?

Our cruising guides were a perfect business outlet for our mutual passions: Mark’s passions for computers, photography, design, and boats; and my passions for the outdoors, nature, writing, and research.

Cruising is like living an eco-tour.

When you cruise, nature is all around you. Although I try to balance the vignettes to include history, geography, geology, archaeology, and so on, my favorite vignettes to write are nature-based. I’m an avid (Mark says obsessive) bird-watcher (now called a “birder”), but I’m particularly interested in birds in their larger ecological context, which means plants, insects, climate, etc.

To help me write the vignettes, sometimes I think of myself as a guide on an eco-tour, interpreting all the amazing natural sights along a particular waterway or in an anchorage.

Atlantic Puffin

When you live aboard a boat, natural phenomena that other people pay to experience with a nature tour are regular daily sightings. Destinations that folks go on birding trips become your home for days or weeks!

In the Dry Tortugas, we anchored for days surrounded by the racket of thousands of sooty terns and brown noddies. They were our all-day companions. Most birders have to take a ferry out to the island and only spend a few hours before being herded back aboard for the return trip.

When we sailed the coast of Maine, we charted our course along Eastern Egg Rock to experience the successful reintroduction of an Atlantic Puffin colony. We had front row seats as puffins commuted back and forth with beak-fulls of tiny fish.

I was reminded of the unique vantage point of the cruising lifestyle when I read Return of the Osprey, by David Gessner. The author fervently wished to see an osprey haul a fish out of the water in its talons. I can’t even count how many times I’ve witnessed this event from our boat at anchor. Wildlife, doing their daily chores, are your neighbors when you live aboard.

But I want to do more than just “watch birds.”

On land, I love participating in projects that aid bird conservation. There are countless opportunities for this: Christmas Bird Counts (CBCs), Important Bird Area (IBA) surveys, or the Breeding Bird Atlas.

But what about when I’m birding aboard? Although I love watching birds, and searching for new birds, it’s not enough. Writing our cruising guides helps scratch that itch by letting me share my knowledge about common bird species. I also write articles on more advanced birding for nature magazines.

Now I’m ready to start my next project: a “CBC at Sea.”

As I brainstormed how I could bring my passion for bird conservation onto a moving vessel, I came up with the idea of a “CBC at Sea.”

CBC at Sea:

A call to those who spend time at sea to establish a worldwide annual bird count and contribute their ocean sightings to a citizen-science database for the study and conservation of pelagic species.

The cruising community is a huge untapped resource for citizen science. We are tuned in with our environment, educated, and interested in the marine world. We explore the less-traveled areas. And there are literally thousands of us out there!

Bridled Tern

Remember all the amazing bird sightings you’ve experienced at sea? The tropic bird colony along a rocky cliff? A seabird that followed your stern wake? The tired songbird that landed on your gunwale? The birds seen as you dinghied to a little island off your anchorage?

If you’re on the water and interested in nature, then you can really help.

Your sightings matter since there aren’t too many scientists who have the time and money to be where you are! Citizen science is the new thing in this massively-connected digital world. Research and conservation databases need reports from those of us who live unconventional lifestyles in unconventional places (admit it, live-aboard cruising is highly unconventional!)

It’s fine if you’re not a bird-whiz. We need to start somewhere and, just like land birding over the decades, knowledge will come in time. But we need to start getting the data and spreading awareness sooner than later! For example, when the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred, so little was known about seabirds on the Gulf of Mexico that the early spill data basically had to function as baseline information.

The initial idea is to have boaters from around the world record their local bird observations on a one-day count. Observations would be submitted to a central database, such as Cornell University’s eBird.

If you’re home-schooling, this is a perfect project to teach children about ornithology, marine biology, data-gathering and recording, citizen science, and seabird conservation. There remain so many unanswered questions about ocean birds, such as where some species breed or winter. Your child can help answer these puzzles!

If you’re interested in participating or staying updated about the CBC at Sea, send me an email at diana@managingthewaterway.com. I’ll send information as the project develops.

Get Involved in Seabird Citizen Science!

Even if you don’t consider yourself a birder, here are some tips to help you or your home-schooled child identify what you see.

1. Purchase a field guide for your area. Women and Cruising’s website includes many excellent regional suggestions.
2. Take notes or draw sketches of what you see. First look and record; identification can come later.
3. Ask locals. Their knowledge of nature usually far surpasses what’s available in field guides or even web searches.
4. Jot down what locals call a bird. Do they call it a “dry land booby” or a “diablotin”? That’s a black-capped petrel. Many regional field guides include local names.
5. Submit your sightings to Cornell’s eBird database so it can be used to help bird conservation and study trends (www.ebird.com). This is a great activity for home-schoolers.

About Diana Doyle

Diana Doyle and her husband Mark write the cruising guide and electronic charting series, Managing the Waterway. They wrote their first two guides, covering the Intracoastal Waterway and Florida Keys, while cruising on a PDQ catamaran and home-schooling their son.

Diana began birding at age seven, when her third grade visiting teacher, a “twitcher” (compulsive bird-lister) from the U.K., ignored the state-mandated curriculum and took his students birding all day—resulting in an entire class in remedial summer school. She recovered from that early academic setback to earn a Ph.D. from Yale and is still birding forty years later. A former political science professor with a lifelong interest in environmental conservation, she also holds a 50-ton USCG Master’s License.

Mark and Diana’s latest guide is An Illustrated Cruising Guide to the Great Loop Inland Waterway: Chicago to Mobile. You can see details on all their titles, see Mark’s photos, download additional cruising guide resources, and get the latest guide updates at their website: www.managingthewaterway.com.

Read also on this website

• Katharine Lowrie sets sail to protect wildlife
• Take Your Passion Cruising: Birdwatching
• Cruising Women’s bookstore: Nature guides that Women and Cruising contributors carry aboard their boats

More information (external links)

• Christmas Bird Count, from Wikipedia
• Audubon Official Christmas Bird Count (CBC) page
• What is an Important Bird Area?
• The ebird website (on-line database of bird observations)
• Details on Mark and Diana Doyle’s cruising guides: www.managingthewaterway.com

Has cruising given you a unique opportunity to explore YOUR passions?

Do you have stories to share about how cruising has brought you up close to nature?

Do you want to get involved with the Christmas Bird Count at Sea?

Let us know.

Email kathy@forcruisers.com or leave a comment below.

Janna Cawrse Esarey will be speaking at the 2010 Seattle Boat Show, January 29 – February 6, 2010, at Qwest Field.

Janna is the author of The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers, and a Woman’s Search for ...Read more]]> Here’s a great opportunity to meet another Women and Cruising friend:

Janna Cawrse Esarey will be speaking at the 2010 Seattle Boat Show, January 29 – February 6, 2010, at Qwest Field.

Janna is the author of The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers, and a Woman’s Search for the Meaning of Wife.

Gwen Hamlin and I both read Motion and thoroughly enjoyed it. Janna has a great sense of humor, and she certainly captures the dynamics of cruising, especially that of a couple learning to live together on a small boat. I highly recommend it!

Janna will be giving seminars on Sunday and Monday. Monday is Women’s Day at the Boat Show!

Here are the details of Janna’s seminars:

Writing and Sailing: From Blog to Book and Everything In Between

Sun, Jan 31, 2:15 pm, Red Stage

Ever dreamed of writing the next great sea story? Want to see your name in by-lines? Need advice on boat blogging? This hands-on seminar will help. We’ll start small (blogs, queries, your favorite sailing rags) and end big (book proposals, manuscripts, publication). Open to experienced writers and armchair writers alike.

The Motion of the Ocean

Mon, Feb 1, 3 pm, Green Stage

Janna Cawrse Esarey will show photos and read from her travel memoir, The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers, & a Woman’s Search for the Meaning of Wife (Simon & Schuster 2009). It’s the humorous, true story of a couple that honeymoons across the Pacific on a beat-up, old boat—only to find that sailing 17,000 miles is easier than keeping their relationship off the rocks. If you’re interested in blue-water cruising, boating as a couple, women aboard, or just want a good laugh, come join us!

Keeping Your Onboard Relationship Off the Rocks

Mon, Feb 1st, 5 pm Green Stage, and 6:15 pm Red Stage

You love your spouse. You love your boat. Why can’t you three get along? Take heart, even the happiest union strains under onboard pressures; our friends call their boat the Divorce Machine. This hands-on seminar will help you identify potential pitfalls and give you tools for boating better together. Topics include the Pink and the Blue, Boat Hygiene, Romance on Watch, Divorce Docking, and most importantly, What She’s Actually Thinking. This seminar is intended for anyone—sailors, powerboaters, racers, cruisers, men, women—who would like to sail happily ever aboard with a loved one.

And here is the same schedule organized by day, so you can plan your visit to the Seattle Boat Show:

About the Seattle Boat Show:

Seattle Boat Show – Qwest Field – Fri, January 29 – Sat, February 6, 2010

Visit the Seattle Boat show website

View the complete seminar schedule.

See the list of Janna’s seminars at the Seattle Boat Show.

About Janna Cawrse Esarey

Janna Cawrse Esarey is a teacher by training, a writer by day, and a sailor by luck.

Her book, The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers, & a Woman’s Search for the Meaning of Wife (Simon & Schuster 2009), is the humorous true story of a couple that honeymoons across the Pacific on a beat-up, old boat—only to find that sailing 17,000 miles is easier than keeping their relationship off the rocks.

Janna’s work appears in sailing magazines, such as Cruising World, Blue Water Sailing, and 48 North, and travel anthologies, most recently More Sand in My Bra.

She blogs about work-life-love balance for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at “Happily Even After.” Janna was selected as a 2008 Jack Straw Writer and currently performs the juggling act of writer, mom, and wife—only dropping a few balls daily. Visit her at http://www.byjanna.com.

It took him two years to convince me to sail away with him, and he never would have done ...Read more]]> When my husband, Evans Starzinger, suggested sailing around the world, I had almost no sailing experience and reacted much the same way I would have if he had suggested flying a rocket to the moon.

It took him two years to convince me to sail away with him, and he never would have done it if I hadn’t decided there was something in it for me – besides being with him! That something was writing.I have always wanted to be a writer. I completed my first book at age 7, a long story (with illustrations) about a police horse who saves his master. I spent many hours as a child sitting in a closet with a dog-eared notebook and a chewed on pencil spinning out long and outrageous stories about my many fantasy lives.

When Evans and I started thinking about walking away from our careers and heading off in a totally different direction, I wanted writing to be part of whatever the future held. Today I think of myself as a writer and a sailor. But the transition was not an easy one and took dedication and hard work for me, and compromise and acceptance from Evans.

During our first circumnavigation between 1992 and 1995, I got exactly two articles accepted by the sailing magazines. I wrote those articles on a manual typewriter and mailed the manuscripts in from halfway around the world. It was months before I heard back from the editors, and the articles only appeared in print several years after I wrote them.

It was while we were ashore building the boat we have lived aboard for the past ten years that I really managed to break into the sailing magazine market. I submitted article after article, and I gradually mastered the craft of putting words down on paper so that others understood what I was trying to communicate.

I built relationships with the editors of four sailing magazines, and I learned what each magazine was looking for and how to tailor my writing to their needs. I also wrote my first two books, which increased my credibility and visibility.

By the time we left on our second boat in 1999, I had the contacts and the reputation to be able to set up a writing schedule a year ahead of time with the editors of the various magazines. The income from my article and book writing covered most of our living expenses over the last ten years.

Writing from a boat is not easy. Most writers say they need a consistent routine, a daily appointment with their computer, in order to be productive.

Ashore, I sat down in my chair at my desk at 7:00 in the morning each weekday and didn’t get up again until noon. But that doesn’t work on the boat where tides, weather, maintenance and, on passage, watchkeeping all force us to work to a schedule other than our own.

I have had to learn to write in the spaces between these things, to sit down and be immediately productive, to immerse myself with a moment’s notice into whatever I am working on.

When cruising in remote areas with unpredictable weather, we find a bulletproof anchorage and sit for a week while I do all my writing for a month.

On the other hand, writing from a boat means having an endless supply of material to shape and share with readers. It means capturing the voyage in a permanent and lasting way, and processing it as you go along so that you appreciate it as it unfolds instead of only really valuing it after the fact.

It allows you to share with friends, family or a wider audience experiences they will never directly be able to enjoy. It provides a window onto your life and keeps you connected in ways that photographs and phone calls simply cannot do. I have shared my journal with my father throughout the last five years of our voyaging, and in that way I have been able to bring him along with me on the voyage of a lifetime.

And, for me, being at sea opens up wellsprings of creativity and makes them accessible to me in a way they never are ashore.

After we’ve been on passage for four or five days, the voice in my head that is going constantly nagging at me on shore, reminding me not to forget this or to do that, finally stutters to a halt. I become porous. The world beyond me seems to enter my very soul, and the voice at the heart of me becomes audible.

My best, most creative writing has always been done on or just after a passage. Taking my writing cruising has made me a far better writer than I ever could have been otherwise.

GETTING PUBLISHED

Breaking in to the sailing magazines today is both easier and harder than when I first started writing more than 15 years ago. The internet and onboard communications have made the logistics much easier. But most of the sailing magazines increasingly rely on a small stable of “professional” writers and take fewer and fewer manuscripts over the transom. Some of the magazines receive more than 1,500 unsolicited articles each month, articles competing for a diminishing number of pages in most magazines.

There are many ways to share your experiences through your writing with others including blogs, email updates, websites, newsletters and family letters. But if you really want to write for publication, there are four ways to increase the odds of getting an article accepted by one of the magazines.

1. Know your magazine. The different magazines all have different niches and cater to different audiences. Read the magazines to learn what they are most likely to be interested in, and then tailor your idea to fit the magazine.A story about heavy weather during a passage across the North Atlantic is more likely to be of interest to Cruising World or Bluewater Sailing than to Good Old Boat or SAIL.For the best chance of getting a manuscript accepted, download the writer’s guidelines from any magazine you’re interested in writing for, and do what they say!
2. Write about how, not why. Most people who read these magazines want to go cruising and don’t need to be convinced, but most writers want to write about the magical moments of cruising and why they’re out there.The magazines get dozens of stories about beautiful sunsets and catching fish on passages, but not enough stories about provisioning in foreign ports or relationships on board. If you write about what you most wanted to know, what most concerned you, in the months before you left, you’re far more likely to have an article published.
3. Take good photos. Today magazines cannot get away with publishing words only on a page, no matter how beautifully written. Images are just as important, and you have to be able to provide them.Invest in a good digital camera and practice taking pictures of both how-to subjects and of the places you visit.You need to be able to submit between one and two dozen good pictures for a how-to article and between 40 and 60 images for an article about a destination.
4. Query first. Especially with how-to articles, it pays to query first, before you actually sit down and write. The editors may love the idea but want to shape it in one direction or another. Or they may have just run an article on that topic or be about to run one, but still be interested in a related topic. Queries save you and them time. Make the query focused, short (no more than four paragraphs) and be sure to specify the length of the proposed article (words), your qualifications for writing it and what kind of artwork you can provide.

About Beth Leonard

Beth Leonard and her husband, Evans Starzinger, have completed two circumnavigations and logged more than 110,000 nautical miles. Between 1992 and 1995, they sailed westabout by way of the Panama Canal, Torres Straits and the Cape of Good Hope aboard their Shannon 37, Silk.

They spent four years ashore building their 47-foot aluminum Van de Stadt Samoa sloop, Hawk, before leaving again in 1999. They have just completed a ten-year, eastabout circumnavigation by way of all of the Great Capes that took them as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as Cape Horn.

Beth has written more than 200 articles that have appeared in the pages of the US and UK sailing magazines, including most recently Cruising World, Sailing, Good Old Boat, Yachting World and Practical Sailor.  Beth has had columns in Blue Water Sailing and Yachting World, and Evans has had a column in Yachting Monthly.

Beth has written three books: The Voyager’s Handbook, Following Seas, and Blue Horizons. Her how-to book, The Voyager’s Handbook, is widely accepted as the definitive treatise on bluewater cruising.  Her most recent book, Blue Horizons, won a 2007 National Outdoor Book Award in the outdoor literature category.

Want more info?

• Visit Beth and Evans’ website for information on their travels plus extensive cruising information: www.bethandevans.com
• Beth is giving seminars during Fall 2009 at boat shows and cruiser get-togethers. Check out her 2009 Seminar Schedule.
• Read Writers’ and Photographers’ Guidelines for popular cruising magazines:
  Cruising World, SAIL, Good Old Boat, Blue Water Sailing, Latitudes and Attitudes, Caribbean Compass

Related articles

• Should I quit my job and go cruising? Beth Leonard responds
• Taking Passions Cruising (Admiral’s Angle column #41)

What’s YOUR passion? Have you taken it cruising?
Let us know. Email kathy@forcruisers.com or leave a comment below.