In late 2014 I published a sort of pilot book entitled “165 Rocks and Other Stuff to Tie your Boat to in Eastern Sweden and Finland”.

This is a partial, incomplete, inaccurate, biased, derivative, idiosyncratic, unoriginal, unreliable, flippant guide to mooring in the Baltic archipelagos of Sweden and Finland for insecure, English speaking wimps who are lacking in confidence but resigned to running aground on the odd rock occasionally.

As the name suggests, the ‘guide’ details 165 places where you can tie your boat up in eastern Sweden and Finland.

My main aim in writing the thing was to wax lyrical about the joys of the cool forests, warm sea, hot, sun-drenched rocks and sizzling barbeques of wild Baltic anchorages in the summer. Just fling an anchor over the stern, hop ashore from the bow and tie your boat to a tree in any one of thousands of perfectly sheltered, island bays, for a summer holiday experience that is both idyllic and virtually free. Spend a summer cruising this part of the Baltic and, at last, you won’t have to keep moaning about how much money your boat is costing you. It’s payback time when you are living for free in the Balmy Baltic in summer.

With usual lack of resolve I diversified into guest harbours and marinas, but some of these are also free, particularly away from the peak season. Most are extremely affordable by British standards. After a few pages of introduction, each rocky bay or harbour gets one page, with a satellite image, a waypoint, a few photos and some extremely variable notes, the quality of which rather depends on my mood at the time of my visit. The picture below is a (shrunken) example.

“165 Rocks” is published as a full colour, large format paperback of just under 200 pages. It’s available at the UK Martin Edge Author Page at Amazon and at http://www.amazon.com/author/edge. Unlike my other books it’s not available as an e-book or in monochrome as it just wouldn’t work in either format. Sorry about that.

Anyway, I hope you find the information in it of some use. If you do enjoy it at all, check out the various e-books and paperbacks detailed on this website and available through the Martin Edge Author Page at Amazon, I-Tunes, most e-book online retailers such as Kobo and the daftly named Smashwords.

I’d welcome comments on 165 Rocks at martin@edge.me.uk bearing in mind, through your seething ire, that however annoying you found it I’ve not made much money out of it, since it’s on sale at not much more than the cost price.

There’s a few stories about my 2013 Baltic cruise here on the ‘Sail in Finland’ website, where the Finnish bits of ‘165 Rocks’ have been ‘serialised’.