If I can miss major ways that MFDs display currents and tides, lord only knows how much I might mess up a comparison of 3D charting.  There are so many aspects to 3D presentation, and virtually no bench mark as to what is right.  In fact, I’m running the Raymarine E140 Wide screen shot first because it illustrates one of the few things that’s clearly wrong, I think, which is to put the vessel on center, so that you get the most detail of the waters you’ve already passed through.  But Raymarine has long offered good Look Ahead features in its 2D chart presentation (as seen in the left window, set at 2/3rds ahead), and I know that 3D Look Ahead is high on its list of planned software updates…

I sort of knew that “shootout” was a poor word choice — implying the certainty of corpses and so forth — and I’m officially dropping it from the Panbo title vocabulary; it’s too hard to be that certain!  A glaring example was omitting Furuno tide graphs from the MFD tide “shootout”; I knew better, really, but somehow briefly lumped tides and currents into the POI info that’s so far missing from the NavNet 3D charts (but won’t be once Active Captain and C-Map data is supported).  In fact, you just click and spin the RotoKey to Tide Graph, click again, and you get the nice screen seen above of the nearest prediction station.  But it’s not perfect, and when it comes to current predictions, it looks like none of the MFDs are…

I may regret that title eventually, though I’ve just been cruising with four premium MFDs for two weeks, often using them seriously for four or five hours a day.  But that doesn’t mean I’ve learned every nuance of these complex beasts, or that I’ve developed strong preferences.  Actually I have (mostly minor) complaints about every one of them!…even if they’re all way better than the electronics I used around this coast 40, 30, 20, 10, even 5 years ago.  I’m going to start with something fairly simple…

Jeffrey Siegel caused a minor ruckus when he titled an iphonesailing.net thread about ActiveCaptain “There’s no reason to buy another guide book…”  I’m a huge fan of AC, and I’ve watched Jeff’s bold predictions come true one after another, but in this case I’d like to think he was just trying to provoke a constructive argument.  I don’t think AC or any other source of cruising info will ever do a complete job, and my goal is have as many sources as possible on tap.  The little harbor I sit in right now is an excellent example…