Category: Charts

An interesting solution for the Jonesport uncharted breakwater problem came all the way from the S/V True Love in La Paz, Mexico.  Skipper Bill Stockton has written a program called ChartAid which can turn Google Earth photo maps into BSB format so you can navigate on them in programs like CE, Nobeltec, and Chart View.  I did get an “Invalid BSB” warning when I installed the chart Bill sent into CE, but it works fine.  As you can see above, the registration with the official chart looks spot on, and my vessel, track, and route, plus data sets like GuideBook, overlay properly.  Even the “properties” make sense, with the possible exception of the Source date.  And apparently it’s easy to make such photo maps with ChartAid…

Yup, the first time you cruise into Sawyer Cove in often foggy Jonesport, Maine, you may be surprised to discover that there is a substantial steel and concrete breakwater extending from the fixed light almost all the way to the Eastern shore.  That’s because the structure still hasn’t made it onto the official charts, or any chart I’ve seen, even though it was built over 20 years ago, and even though the NOAA ENC inset above was updated on 9/17/2010.  I mentioned this when I first wrote about Sawyer Cove in August, but that entry was largely about how poorly any of the guides — digital or paper, professionally written or crowd sourced — covered the facilities available.  Since then I’ve learned more about the breakwater situation, and it’s depressing…

Back in April I enthused about the improved Guide Book section seen in the Coastal Explorer 2010 beta, soon to be official in CE 2011, but I didn’t mention discovering all the UK and Euro data that’s had been added using CE’s own built-in Guidebook tool.  I’ve played with the tool myself, and it’s easy to create a POI with free form text, a link, and even photos.  And it’s easy to sync/cache all the Guidebook data stored on CE.net, like it is with ActiveCaptain, Atlantic Cruising Club, and other data sets (when your PC is online).  But for some reason hardly anyone in the U.S., aside from the Pacific Northwest, has contributed Guidebook data.  So how is it that England and nearby coasts are studded with all sorts of valuable port and marina Guidebook POIs — and some more fanciful items, like that nice shout out to Panbo above?  And what might it say about this whole crowd sourcing thing?

Big, big news in the world of user generated content (or UGC, or crowd sourcing, or whatever we decide to call it):  Navionics Mobile 5, rolling out around the world as I write, supports UGC, big time, and it’s central to the company’s “Navionics Anytime, Anywhere” vision of the future.  Those screen shots above — which show the new “Community Layer” turned on and off — are from a beta of US East 5.0 running on the Panbo test iPhone, but most all of that UGC work was done by Navionics founder and chief visionary Giuseppe Carnevali when he cruised up here in early September.  It would be hard to overstate Giuseppe’s enthusiasm about enabling interested Navionics users to share data of all sorts, some of which can be validated and added to the company’s regular chart database for the benefit of all users…

So I’ve done more research into the various small issues I’ve noticed regarding recent NOAA chart changes to Camden Harbor (discussed most recently here).  Let me emphasize small, and also my appreciation of NOAA as an agency with vast tasks and limited resources.  The intent of charting the Outer Harbor channel buoys maintained by the town, and updating dock details in the crowded Inner Harbor, is excellent; nearly every day I’m around the harbor I hear visiting boats getting guidance about these matters via VHF.  But the chart update issues certainly bring up questions about who’s responsible for what and NOAA’s quality control system, as well as ones regarding intentional and unintentional chart presentation details.  And they probably apply to the official charts all around the country…

The photo is from a BoatUS press release discussing how it, NOAA, and several other organizations are concerned that many boaters are using outdated charts.  They’ve even got a survey going (quick and easy), and I bet the results will confirm their worry.  But while the new Alliance for Safe Navigation they’ve formed leads to a neat Notice to Mariners tool I hadn’t seen before, I worry about more than keeping up with NOAA’s chart changes…

The Simrad NSE10 prototype is back in the lab, and will soon be back on Gizmo at the heart of an extensive SimNet/Ethernet test system. Only now it’s running recently released 2.0 firmware and it’s loaded with the HD version of Navico’s Insight charts that was missing in prototype mode. I was particularly interested in checking out the latter as I’m working on a charting piece for Cruising World, and I like what I’ve seen so far…