I recently went sailing with a friend who has a 54' Swan. He's not very
electronic savy. At one point his wife was at the helm and asked me for
help interperting the display on the chartplotter. He had it set up for a
North-up display, and we were headed SW, which made the display confusing
for his wife. I switched it to heading-up and she immediately understood
what she was looking at. When the husband returned to the helm, he asked
me to switch it back.

Yesterday he stopped by the house and I questioned why he had the display
orientated that way. He said that

(1) He sails with two individuals who are in the CG, one of whom commands
an ice breaker. He claims that's the way that the CG operates all of their
displays, and if that's the way that the CG operates, there must be a
reason.

(2) He wants to keep his radar display and chartplotter synchronized, so
they're both in N-up mode.

(3) Some piece of navigation software that he runs on a PC down below only
does N-up, so he wants to keep them the same.

I argued that N-up isn't intuitive. It's fine for plotting courses, but
when I'm at the helm, I want the display to match what I'm seeing. It was
obvious from the reaction of his wife that she felt that heading-up was
more intuitive. I can't imagine that there's an issue with the radar (a
Furuno) as keeping that in N-up takes a lot computing power than heading-
up.

I also noted that when he was at the helm, that he kept scrolling the
display to see what was ahead of him as he rarely kept the boat centered on
the display. I explained that he could have the chartplotter position the
boat so that it was at the bottom 1/3 of the display and then would have
the top 2/3 of the dislay to show what was ahead. That didn't pulse him.

Personally I like to have my display in configured in course-up mode when
navigating to waypoints and in heading-up when I'm simply driving the boat.
I also configure it as described in the above paragraph to maximize my view
of what's ahead.

How do others have their displays configured? How does the CG have their's
configured? What's the purpose of N-up vs heading-up?

-- Geoff
www.GeoffSchultz.org