Small-Boat Seamanship Manual

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for Coast Guard Auxiliarists, OK for others
Review: This book is essentially the US Coast Guard Boat Crew Seamanship manual boiled down to the essentials, minus a few hundred pages and ten pounds. It's actually more convenient and accurate (at this writing) than the current edition of the Auxiliary Boat Crew manual, and certainly is a lot easier to read. It's very conveniently organized to coincide exactly with the Aux Boat Crew Qualification checklist, and it compactly includes most of the diagrams and illustrations one needs to make sense of the text. The Auxiliary doesn't officially recommend outside texts, but I think this is probably the best single-volume preparation for boat crew qualification you can lay your hands on, official versions included.

It does skip details in the regular Coast Guard Boat Crew manual and a few from the official Aux Boat Crew manual, so should not be a replacement so much as the condensed introduction. But I honestly doubt most of those details (such as foam to water mixtures in CG firefighting equipment or details on crew physical requirements down to the number of pull-ups you have to do to qualify) will be germane to typical Auxiliary duties.

For non-Auxiliarists, it's mostly useful, but there's a lot about Coast Guard procedures that may not be of much interest. For this reason, I still think that if you want a one-volume seamanship manual, Chapman Piloting or the Annapolis Book of Seamanship are better first-purchases.

However, in many ways this book is a better checklist for the skills every recreational boater really ought to acquire. For one thing, it is organized more like a checklist, and it's easier to skim through to find the germane items than its more established counterparts.

Highly recommended for Coast Guard Auxiliarists or those interested in joining, well-recommended as the second or subsequent seamanship reference for others.