This is a guide to cruising in your own boat amongst the beautiful islands of eastern Sweden and Finland. It details 165 harbours and anchorages along these coasts where you might consider stopping. The majority are natural harbours where you can tie a yacht to the rocks and hop ashore with your barbeque, Scandinavian style. But there's details of a lot of marinas and guest harbours as well. Because it's a large format, full colour paperback it's more expensive than my other books, I'm afraid. But it's not much more than cost price and if you do use it to find somewhere free to stay for a couple of nights you'll already be in profit. Most pilot books and harbour guides are of course based on personal experience and therefore somewhat anecdotal. In 165 Rocks I at least admit to these shortcomings.

This is a partial, incomplete, anecdotal, biased, derivative, idiosyncratic, sometimes abusive, flippant guide to mooring in the Baltic archipelagos of Sweden and Finland for insecure, English-speaking wimps who lack confidence but are resigned to running into the odd rock occasionally. Each rock or harbour has a dedicated page with an aerial view showing at least one suitable place to tie up, some photos and a description of the harbour and often the island it's part of. There's also a Lat/Long GPS position so that you can find the bloody thing. The guide is divided into five geographical sections, each with a map showing the approximate position of all the rocks. The introduction also contains a few idiosyncratic recommendations about tying up techniques, navigation and other useful information. It will not have escaped your eagle eyes that the cover photo is rotated through 90 degrees. That's because it's in landscape format with the spine at the top, calendar style. It just seemed to suit the content better that way.

It's beyond the technological capabilities of a small organisation like Amazon to turn it the right way up on their website. I spent three seasons cruising in the Baltic in my wee 27ft yacht, most of the time hopping from rock to rock amongst the fabulous, beautiful, complex, rocky archipelagos of the east coast of Sweden and the north coast of the Gulf of Finland. As a North Sea sailor it took me a while to get used to the strange, alien environment and the correspondingly alien practices required to deal with it. But eventually, with the help of some excellent Scandinavian resources and the hindrance of most British publications on the subject, I felt at home in this most perfect of summer cruising destinations. Many of the British and other tidal sailors I came across seemed to suffer from a sort of disability when it came to exploring the thousands of perfect natural bays, anchorages and rocky barbeque spots which litter the region. They mostly ignored all the good places and instead motored busily from major city to major city. So I thought I'd have a go at writing this harbour guide, based only on my own limited personal experience, with a lot of help from two superb Swedish publications in particular, which I hope I acknowledge sufficiently. Whether you buy this book or not, go sailing amongst the islands inside it anyway.

It must be one of the world's most idyllic cruising destinations.