Navigating by Google Earth

A small aside, for those who haven't heard of the Google Earth plug-in available for chart-plotters such as OpenCPN, which is the laptop nav program we use at our nav station. It's free to download, as are many of the charts, depending on where you are in the world.

Here is a pic' of our plotter, as we dangled on the mooring waiting for the Swansea bridge to open. To be followed by a spot of pretty tight navigation/pilotage between sand banks - a prime use for the GE plug-in. It shows the GE window with present position indicated; the GE window view moves and scales automatically with the main OpenCPN chart picture...

GE plug-in for OpenCPN

We also found it very useful in places like Fiji where the charts are inaccurate and out of date. Coral grows swiftly in these areas! Often GE was the only nav aid we had there, besides the Mk I Eyeball, with someone up the mast, sitting on the first spreader.

If you expect to be out of coms, and therefore off-line, you can even scan an area in advance then save the GE cache for use later. Again, we've used this technique successfully and would recommend it in out-of-the-way areas with poor chartage. An on-line article here describes it, courtesy of Yachting World and Rory Garland aboard SV Soggy Paws.

The program SAS.Planet is also discussed, of which we have no experience, but will be experimenting later...