SALISH SEA PILOT GUIDES “ALMOST FREE”

Nothing feels more altruistic than offering cruising guides as free downloads. And it made the folks at Salish Sea Pilot pretty popular at dock parties, too.

But after more than 17,000 free downloads of their guides to waters off B.C. and Washington state, the publishers decided that maybe “almost free” would be a touch more sustainable.

Jim Burgoyne and Lynne Picard just released their completely rebuilt 2015 Gulf Islands, San Juan Islands and Desolation Sound cruising guides, adding many new illustrations, fresh information and making them much easier to navigate. They are offering the ebooks for $5 each.

Salish Sea Pilot will also soon be releasing guides to Puget Sound and the Northern Georgia Strait, as well. The five guides will cover virtually every good anchorage and marina with visitor moorage across the Salish Sea.

The guides are best viewed on a tablet device, but they will run on Windows and Macintosh computer and virtually any smartphone, as well.

Researching and creating the guides has been pretty much a full-time job for Burgoyne since 2011 when he and Picard sailed home from Asia in Quiver, their Vancouver 27. They now live aboard their Tayana 37 in Victoria, BC.

I was naive,” he said. “I thought with reasonable rates and lots of readers, advertisers would fall out of trees to be in our guides. But times were tough. We cover a huge area spread over two countries and figure we needed a full-time crew of ad-sellers on jet skis to make it work.”

With a smile, Burgoyne said he should have paid closer attention to what went on in the advertising department during his years as a newspaper journalist.

Many of the changes in the new guides came about from feedback they received from users of the beta versions. “We rely a lot on our users,” he said. “No one knows an anchorage better than someone who returns there year after year to reunite with friends.­”

The little company takes pride that the guides are constantly updated and changes are made the moment they learn of them, Burgoyne said.

Download a sample of a guide here

The guides can be downloaded from http://salishseapilot.com