If your heart is set on the very latest charting, complete with 1ft depth contours and custom shading, then you will gravitate towards the apps from the big two charting providers: Navionics and C-Map. While they aren’t waterproof and need to be kept charged, you’ll already be familiar with intuitive control gestures such as pinch-to-zoom.Īll these sailing apps make it easy to browse for charts in their dedicated stores, and, although you never physically own the charts as you would with a chart card, the annual subscription model can be cost-effective, with coverage starting at £2.49. Mobile phones and tablets make great chartplotters, with their built-in GPS and powerful processors. There are many other genres in the canon of sailing apps, which we will be exploring in future issues of Yachting Monthly… Sailing Apps: Charting You can also use some of these sailing apps to rent out your own boat, or to charter someone else’s. Searching is easy thanks to a range of smart filters and prices are up to 50% lower than the headline. Think of these as a supercharged version of the time-honoured charter broker, with tens of thousands of boats on their books. Like other crowdsourced info, the trick has been to find a light-touch way of moderating the data to ensure it is correct, clean and not libellous!Ĭhartering is the other obvious service that can be performed by sailing apps. It answers a perennial complaint in my household, that pilot guides tell you how to get somewhere but not why to go there. That’s because they can be updated in real time and annotated by other users.įrom off-the-beaten-track anchorages to advice about the best cliff walks and the finest pint/sangria/rum punch – the social nature of cruising makes it ideal for crowdsourcing this sort of content. These are often smart versions of familiar friends.īut they can go one step further than those beautiful hardcover guides that cost £40-50 a pop. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting you dispense with your treasured sailing library, but their digital versions can provide a handy backup.Ī host of sailing apps have grown up around providing key cruising data to enable you to get safely into a new port. Chartering apps have grown considerably over the last few years, allowing you to easily book your holiday.
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