Sharing of Routes, Tracks and Waypoints

[MicHughV]

Yes, the satnav was tricky....my first trip to Bermuda, was done using a satnav.
By the time I got a position fix, I was skirting with disaster. Bermuda is ringed with reefs and countless wrecks...I had thought I was in the clear, but I was woefully wrong and managed to avoid disaster by the skin of my teeth. This was an early morning arrival and the sun had yet to come up. I just made a quick U-turn and followed my track out again.
Interestingly enough, there were two of us aboard that knew how to use a sextant and each day we would plot a noon fix. Ha, our fixes, were usually a mile apart and had that been our only navigational source, we would have hove to until it was light enough to see, but we had become lax in our dependance on electronic gadgetry.

I take my hat off to the old timers !!!

[barnakiel]

Originally Posted by ilenart

I believe it depends on how critical you believe your nav system is to the safety of your boat. If you mainly doing day sailing with plenty of visual references in calm coastal areas, I would be happy with running iNavX or something similar on an ipad. If you are crossing oceans or doing any pilotage / navigation through unfamiliar coral reefs or similar, I would want multiple backups of dedicated plotters, plus ipads or similar running independent systems.

When you start to do complicated navigation, including downloading Grib files for weather planning from satelites, multiple routes with hundreds of weighpoints, etc, the limitations of ipads and tablets start to become apparent. Plus I have had too many experiences when my ipads and laptops hanging and crashing, requiring a restart and / or fixes. The majority of dedicated plotters I have had just “work” whether its rain, hail or shine. Including a few that are over 20 years old.

Ilenart

Yes.


And we too have sailed Cairns to Darwin! Though I do not know how this counts towards your difficulty scale;-(. Probably not too high. We did not have any plotters. Just a basic handheld gps and a decent paper chart. Seemed easy.



We have also cruised Polynesia, where unlike in AUS, we navigated by the eye, mostly.



Apparently neither old school plotters nor more modern plotters run on tablets are required to navigate far and out, also in coral / tidal currents, etc. (We sailed round Great Britain in 2003, again - no plotter).



It is simply so much up to our skills and our ability to use any equipment to its best. Any kind of plotter is fine, much as not essential.



Thinking of apparent limitations of tablets compared to plotters when it comes to "complicated navigation, including downloading Grib files for weather planning from satelites, multiple routes with hundreds of weighpoints". As shown clearly in this vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJgi-F9Njzo

at 1:58 the nav station inside is based around what seems an OS (Win,Linux or iOS) unit (almost certainly a laptop or a tablet) with pretty commercial grade (I think Samsung) screen!


Now, this is an IMOCA - the fastest, wettest boat, with the highest grib / routing and sat data load one can think of. And the G's these boats experince and the humidity are far above anything a cruiser can imagine.



Off course outside, in the cockpit there will be something that connects directly to the data backbone - a B&G, Ray or NKE hardware with ipx67 or similar. But this is not dictated by reliability or ability - but plainly by the fact that all wind, speed, gps, G, helm and AP data are fed onto this bus.


The plotter is simply the last link in boat data chain, and since most data is owned by proprietary sensors, dealers will push the proprietary plotter on top of the pile (which is likely very good for most users!).


Now anybody who prefers otherwise, can deploy a plotter on whatever mobile device one wishes. Very often (due to market share) this will be a waterpoofed tablet (most often one from Apple). But Microsoft and Android units are just as good.



I am 100% into hardwired plotters when these are already onboard the boat I am. To me these are just as good as an iPad, except their inflexibility and reliance on uninterrupted 12 or 24V power is truly something I could live without.


To sum up, I think it is great we have many options and can mix and match and choose according to our habits and preferences.


barnakiel