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On the site for the current versions of the chart there is this warning: “Usage and Coverage Note: Chart regions split by the 180 degree longitude line (ex. This means that to get from 179✮ to 179ºW you have to scroll your way all the way around the world.

I bought the Navionics Charts from the Fugawi X-Traverse site and their charts divide the world down the 180º line and don’t allow users to cross it. But for here in the Pacific, there are issues. There are features of iNavX that I adore, such as the ability to GOTO a waypoint and see your DTW and ETA, etc. There is now a v2015 that I can “upgrade” to for $69.99, but I am not going to take a chance that it is still so bad. Compare this to the chart at the head of the blog. As you can see in the image here their cartography in the Lau islands was horrible.

While I prefer the Garmin Blue Chart app in the Bahamas where they make use of the excellent cartography of the Explorer Charts, Garmin’s Pacific coverage in the v2013.5 that I bought in Jan. I’ve used different iPad apps in the US & Bahamas, the Caribbean, the Med (on vacation with friends), and in the Pacific. Since I like to talk about the different navigation apps, I took some shots of the differences in the views of the different apps. And when we got to the Lau Islands, we found the charts were just as bad as had been predicted. I had already downloaded the KAP files for the islands, but I suddenly realized I had no way to use them on a GPS enabled device. That’s what got me looking again at iPad apps for navigation.įor the most part, Fiji charts are fairly good, but we’d heard that out in the Lau Group, we would find some gross errors in the location of the islands and also in the general drawing of the shapes of the islands. It does me much less good to have the charts open on the screen if I don’t have a GPS signal showing me where I am on the chart. However, with recent updates to my operating system, now neither one of my usb GPS devices will talk to my laptop.

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I happily downloaded these for the Lau Group thinking I would be able to use these on my Mac laptop as I have OpenCPN for the Mac and MacENC. These charts are often passed from yacht to yacht on memory sticks, and there is a good collection of them on the S/V Soggy Paws blog available for download.

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There is now a program called Chart Aid available that makes this process a bit easier, but it does cost $99.00 for the software, and it is for Windows only.

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Our friend Rory Garland, captain of the Grand Soleil 52 Streetcar, wrote an excellent article that explains this called Google Earth navigation: how to sail off the chart with confidence using satellite imagery for the magazine Yachting World. Many cruisers out here use a laptop navigation program using OpenCPN and they create their own charts via Google Earth that are in a file format called KAP. Here in the South Pacific, it can be more dangerous to rely on GPS chart plotters or tablets when the islands are often very far out of their charted positions. The GPS is quite accurate - it’s the charts that aren’t. Some people erroneously call this a problem with GPS. But most of those times, it wasn’t a big deal because I had clear visuals of the area around me, and I didn’t need to follow the charts. When I took my own boat Talespinner up and down the ICW in 2011-2012, I certainly had fun taking iPad screen shots of the times the charts showed me driving my boat across land. Sailing out here in the Pacific has given me a new perspective on what might be my favorite app.

I’ve often blogged about my favorite iPad apps for navigation that make use of the built-in GPS on the iPad. Times certainly have changed, but I can see how that book had lots to do with my fascination with this technology. That book dealt with GPS and it was written in 2006.

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These past few days I have been rereading my own novel Wreckers’ Key, the 4th in the Seychelle series as part of the research I’m doing for the writing of the 5th in that series. We were actually where the purple pin is, but the app showed us to be located on the opposite side of the island. This shows how the charted islands were about half a mile off of their actual position.

Seaiq open cm93