FreeCruisingGuides.com has released A Cruising Guide to Cuba by Frank Virgintino and Amaia Agirre, both of them veteran sailors. The guide has been praised by everyone from the commodore of the Hemingway International Yacht Club in Havana to professors of Latin history. The guide, at more than 500 pages, is well organized and generously illustrated.
(Check out the April issue of PassageMaker magazine for reviewer Milt Baker’s take on Virgintino and Agirre’s book as well as the recently released Yacht Pilot’s Cruising Guide to Cuba by Cheryl Barr)
Caribbean cruisers lie that fact that the guide is free and can be downloaded without registration from www.freecruisingguides.com. There are 10 other guides to the Caribbean as well as other valuable products that can also be downloaded free at the website.
Some members of the cruising community prefer the guide as an eBook rather than as a pdf file and purchase the guides at eBook stores like Amazon for under $10. The eBook format features an interactive table of content.
The founder of Free Cruising Guides, Frank Virgintino, is an accomplished sailor and author who has also spent a lifetime building, owning, and managing marinas across the United States; most currently a new marina in Boca Chica, Dominican Republic. FreeCruisingGuides.com is based on his conviction that all information will be reestablished through the internet in free format as time goes by and that high priced printed guides that are loaded with ads mixed in will become obsolete.
Virgintino also has authored A Thinking Man’s Guide To Voyages South….The Many Facets Of Caribbean Cruising, available at all eBook sellers,. In it he explains for North American cruising sailors the best ways to route to the Caribbean, using what he calls “back door entrances,” which eliminate the need for offshore passages, as well as the use of katabatic winds to go east. The book has been considered a new approach and a change from the old ways of going to the Caribbean.
In addition to the guides that are available, Free Cruising Guides also provides the Caribbean Security Index (CSI). This index was created by the company Director and CEO, Dr. Catherine Hebson. The CSI, also free, provides cruisers with probability analyses for the Caribbean of various types of crime in various locations. Dr. Hebson points out that those that use the CSI can route their course so as to be able to avoid those areas that have the highest incidences of crime, and in particular violent crime. The index has over 26,000 registered users. Users of the CSI also receive a quarterly newsletter from Free Cruising Guides which provides for updates on a broad range of subjects.
FreeCruisingGuides.com is a valuable resource for cruising sailors and has become a household word in the Caribbean. Visit the site soon and take a few of the guides for free. Put them on your iPad or print them out and you will see for yourself what the cruising community is talking about.
