Dinghy Cruising is a great book. The book gives ideas on how to select a dinghy (small open sailboat) and rig it for cruising. The book goes into basics of boat selection, boat tents, camping gear, seamanship and selecting where to cruise.

It opens up new vistas for small sailboat owners. According to Margaret Dye (and a BUNCH of enthusiasts at the Dinghy Cruising Association and the Open Boat discussion group) - you don't need a large self-contained expensive sailboat to cruise. You can explore in a small open sailboat of 12 to 18 feet or so. You can sleep on the floorboards under a boom tent in your little boat, or camp ashore. You can even cook in a little boat.

After reading the book and getting a few ideas, I am planning on extending the range of sailing opportunities by taking overnight and weekend trips in my little (15'6") sailboat. As dinghys are small and light, you can trailer them to your favorite lake, coast or river - and do some great exploring.

I'll be exploring the Georgia lakes. Hope to see you there!

i'm sad to see no one else has reviewed this book, so though it's been a while since i read it & my copy is lost in storage somewhere, i'll try to do this fine little story the justice it deserves: In this fast-reading autobiographical story our author Frank, in his younger days, enlists a young naval student for an ambitious foul-weather sail from England to Iceland in a 13' open dinghy. In the small but rich genre of dinghy cruising (which in the spirit modernity, i hereby rename "microcruising"), this is a must read. adding to the charm is frank's occasional mention of his girlfriend Margaret, who he later married, and who many years later wrote the bible of microcruising, the hugely instructional 'Dinghy Cruising'. Finally, if you like this book it seems impossible you would not also like Robert Manry's "Tinkerbelle," the cleanly told story of a flatlander who singlehands his dinghy from the US to England.

I recieved this book as part of a start up kit on batik. The billing on the book was that it was a good how-to on the batik process. I found it to be remarkably lacking. There was no advice as to how to deal with the more common problems mentioned in the process, and the process, itself was extremely lacking. There were a lot of pretty pictures of batik work from a modern standpoint - but they did not fit in well with the subject matter and seemed more like a "look what I did". There were very few pictures, for example, of the various steps of the process while the artist was in action.

I suppose at this low cost, you get what you pay for.