Excellent ... this would be a great idea for sailors who are a little rusty
with Basic Nav. Why spend all that time planning and plotting when a
computer can do it for you. Short or long passages can be plotted and even
recorded. Tie it all in with your navigational instruments to have a
complete record available to put those naysayers questioning your skills or
passage routing to rest.

If I had 12 bucks for every chart that flew overboard while in mid plot on a
line of sight passage... why I'd be as broke as I am now. Thank you Per for
this timely and valuable information. You should consider contacting
Bobsprit off line to forward this... I'm certain he could wire it into his
DVD recorder and produce a split screen mpeg of his ventures.

BTW - how many shares did you buy??

CM



"Per Elmsäter" wrote in message
...
| Real sailors use nothing but digital charts. It is folish even to have
paper
| charts as backup. What if they get washed overboard for instance, or eaten
| by the ships rat. No it is much safer to have a redundant system of
digital
| charts.
|
| For instance in the Catamaran that I race occasionally, we have a laptop
| setup in each hull connected to it's own GPS. The screen is mounted in
such
| a way that the helmsman can easily see it. That means he always has the
| exact location of the vessel visualized right in front of him. If one
system
| goes down there is always the other to revert to. Much safer than a paper
| chart that is almost always on the verge of blowing overboard.
|
| There is no way having one set of paper charts ( which is the stoneage(
| stoneage = pre millenium ) setup ) can be safer than having two redundant
| systems with digital charts. Someone might of course say that two laptops
is
| mighty expensive. To that I answer h-ll no. You don't need the latest
| megapixeled superHz multimedia gizmo. Digital charts are run absolutely
100%
| satisfactory from a laptop several years old. Actually the ones I've used
| have almost been given to me. If you have vectorized charts you don't even
| need a big harddisk on them.
|
| The whole world can be placed on a CD-Rom. If you need to buy new charts a
| phone- or radio- call coupled with your paypal or credit card No will give
| you an access code that immediately opens up your new charts that are
| already installed on your PC. You can actually have brand new charts
without
| even going ashore, much less finding a store that will sell those old
| stoneage paper charts to you.
|
| If you want to be a real sailor, follow my advice, burn your charts and
join
| me into this new age that is dawning upon us. While you're at it, through
| out that old compass you got that is nothing but a waste of fine spirits.
|
| --
| Perre
|
| You have to be smarter than a robot to reply.
|
|