Charts

Since I'm going to go down inside via the ICW instead of outside, I need some additional charts. I have Waterway Guides and large area charts for the entire coast, but don't have all the detailed charts for the ICW, so I spent the most of the day downloading a full set of electronic charts from NOAA. I also found and downloaded a free open source program, OpenCPN, to view them.

The download took a while, even though I excluded the great lakes and Alaska. However, I did go ahead and get the West Coast and Hawaii, as well as Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. I don't need all of them right now, but since I've got a good connection and plenty of room on my hard drive, I figured getting a full set couldn't hurt.

The best thing about them is that they include tide and current information, which really helps. Since I don't want to run my laptop all the time, I'll mainly use it for trip planning. I'll make simplified sketches of what I need to know for a particular leg and keep it on me anyway, and use paper charts to track my progress. It also has lots of bells and whistles, but I don't know how much of that I want to use, e.g., waypoints, etc. I don't want to get too dependent on something I can't use all the time, e.g., over seas, and might suddenly become unavailable -- laptops are somewhat fragile.