Introducing our new sailing guides
Ever since Helena and I started noforeignland, we’ve wanted to answer one big question when planning a season in a new place:
What are the not‑to‑be‑missed places to stay and visit, and which boat services and clearance offices can we rely on when we get there?
Our new sailing guides are designed to answer that question by highlighting the best of what’s available in each area, giving you a clear starting point for your own plans.
What our guides do
Our guides bring together key information for each sailing area:
- Notes on what it’s like to sail there.
- The best‑reviewed attractions, anchorages and marinas.
- The most highly rated boat services that people actually use: repairs, haul‑outs, fuel, provisioning, and more.
- Summaries of reviews from people clearing in, so you can see what formalities are like there from first‑hand reports.
They show you what matters most, and link through to the map for deeper detail when needed.
Kept up to date by our community
The guides are driven by the same data as our map. Whenever you submit a review or update a place, the guide for that area can change: rankings shift, new places appear, and outdated information naturally goes away.
Which guides are available now?
We’ve released sailing guides for The Bahamas and The Caribbean, with more regions to follow.
Guides are available on the website and in the latest version of our app.
When using the app, look out for the country flag button above the map controls; tap it to see the sailing guide for that area:
Get involved
As with everything on noforeignland, the guides improve as more people use them and share what they find.
If you’re cruising the Caribbean or The Bahamas this season, give them a try, and help steer their content by adding reviews to places on our map.
Let us know which areas you’d like to see guides for next. And if you spot anything that looks wrong, or have suggestions for making the guides more useful, email us at support@noforeignland.com.
You can find a full list of guides at noforeignland.com/guides.
By Steve Neal
Steve and his wife Helena develop and run noforeignland as a free service for the cruising community. They have lived aboard their Hallberg Rassy 43 Amalia since 2014 and have sailed extensively in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the east coast of the United States and Central America.
Hi there. I’m in the app and in The Bahamas and don’t see the flag icon on the main page as stated. Suggestions?
Make sure you have the the latest version of the app installed, or click on the link at the end of the article to see them on the website. The Bahams page is here: https://www.noforeignland.com/guides/countries/bs
Country specific sailing guides ….. you’ve come up with a great solution to this problem. I’d been thinking for a long time that the one obvious thing that was missing from NFL was individual country summaries, mainly as a place to document the checking in and checking out processes. (I use NoonSite for this as present.) But I couldn’t think where you’d place the marker. Clearly you have! So simple. Excellent. Thank you.
I’m glad you like it Allan 🙂 it took us a while to figure out how this should be integrated!
Looking forward to seeing many more and, given your use of AI (yes, it is obvious), it shouldn’t take too long 🤖.
Having had a closer look at some of the sailing guides, I do have a question. The guides say to keep the clearance section up to date by reviewing the Port of Entry and Clearance Agent markers. While this will be appropriate in cases where the procedures vary between Port of Entry offices, there will be many situations where the update applies to all Port of Entry locations and Clearance Agents, and where it’d make no sense to update them all with the same info. Is the only way to get this broad brush type of information on to the system via the support email (per the note at the end of each guide)?
Hi Allan,
Yes the summaries are AI generated but the rest of the text isn’t, and all content goes through a thorough review process, both automated and manual, so it’s still a significant amount of work to prepare and publish the guides.
The summaries are generated from user reviews, and are updated automatically whenever a new review is submitted; without AI, keeping them updated would not be practical. For clearance markers, the summaries give a useful first-hand overview of what it’s like to check in at a given location; whether good or bad. For others, we only list places with the highest overall review ratings.
As with other data on noforeignland, the marker descriptions themselves are community-editable and remain the preferred place to list clearance procedures. We monitor changes where possible, but the accuracy and quality of this information ultimately comes from the community.
I hope this helps.
Steve.
What a great idea and resource. Looking forward to the guides for the Pacific side of Central America. Thanks, Lin