Hooray! We finally got our Amazon shipment, including Jimmy Cornell's World Cruising Destinations and World Cruising Essentials.
We read the medical preparations chapter from The Capable Cruiser. Lin and Larry recommend not only the Red Cross CPR and Wilderness First-Aid classes but a more intensive multi-day emergency medicine seminar (e.g. Wilderness Medical Associates' "Offshore Emergency Medicine", Dickie L. Hill's "Medicine at Sea") for folks who are contemplating long-term cruising. The seminar will probably run about $1500 for both of us, and the Red Cross class will also be a couple hundred dollars apiece. As shipboard references, they recommend Your Offshore Doctor: A Manual of Medical Self-Sufficiency at Sea and the Merck Manual of Medical Information.
For kids' health they say the biggest issues are ear infections and infected coral cuts. For ear infections they recommend a drop of oil in the ears before swimming and alcohol swabs twice a day as preventatives. For cuts, they recommend something called Silvadine.
It seems that a number of cruisers are supporting themselves largely by writing online. I think the model is basically write a lot of good content that draws a lot of traffic and make money on the ad revenue. Maybe then you also get a weekly or monthly column in some publication, and you may also get some level of sponsorship by equipment manufacturers too. For that kind of thing, I think the key is great pictures which just so happen to feature some item or other. It probably helps to be photogenic.
