PETER SWANSON is the principal figure behind Rio Communications, named for his Morgan Out Island 41ketch Rio. Swanson’s first career was newspapering. He was editor of two Sunday newspapers in New Hampshire, where he first began hatching the idea of applying his training to cruising the Cuban coast. After a sojourn in the Bahamas, Dominican Republic and the Caribbean, he was drawn back to the U.S. becoming an editor successively at Yachting and Passagemaker magazines. His day job is managing editor for the Waterway Guide.. For more details, click here.

BRUCE VAN SANT is best known for his book The Gentleman's Guide to Passages South, the finest book of its kind ever written. He’s also the author of Tricks of the Trades and A Cruising and Watersports Guide to the Spanish Virgin Islands. Van Sant is a self-described refugee from a career as an aerospace systems engineer. He’s four decades' experience living, working, writing and speaking in countries of Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. He’s lived aboard his boats between jobs in the Baltic, the North Sea, English Channel, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. By 1979 he had settled into cruising the myriad islands between Florida and South America, his observations about weather and local customs for the heart of his books. For more on Bruce Van Sant, click here.

KEN FICKETT started his boatbuilding career as a boy working afternoons in one of the last wooden boat shops on the Miami River. Sweeping up, caring for tools and acting as a gofer, he learned boat building from one of the best. Forty years later he’s still at it! Having started his own boat building company, Mirage Manufacturing of Gainesville, Florida. He’s built some of the most competitive MORC racing sailboats, high performance airplanes, a line of fast, offshore sportfishing boats and now, a line of unique trawlers, the Great Harbour series, the GH37, GH47 and the Great Harbour N37. Ken writes about boatbuilding, technical issues and marine trends. His most recent work was published in Soundings magazine, headlined “Walk the docks with Ken Fickett, boatbuilder.” His boatbuilding philosophy was the center of an interview published in PassageMaker magazine, which you can read by clicking here.

With the only electronic charts for coastal Cuba