I’ve been having fun playing around with (sorry, "beta testing") Rose Point Navigation Systems Coastal Explorer 2.0, which is currently in beta.
Today I thought I’d discuss the Voyage Planner’s handy Timeline feature. Once you’ve created a route and set your vessel’s cruising speed, you can associate each leg of the route with the appropriate tidal current station. Yes, you have to do this by hand. The software can determine which current station is closest to your route, but if it happens to be in a completely separate body of water on the opposite side of some ribbon of land, "closest" may not be "best".
Anyway, once that’s done, you can slide your route left or right along the timeline. Here’s why this is cool:
If you need to arrive at a particular waypoint at a specific time, you can slide that waypoint left or right along the timeline to align it with the time you want to arrive. All the other waypoints along the timeline slide with it, so you can see when you need to leave, and…even better…what kind of tidal current you’re likely to encounter along each segment of the trip.
In this example, I’ve decided to leave Edmonds (waypoint 001) at 10:00 on May 16th, arriving in Friday Harbor (waypoint 030) about 13:40 for a big C-Brats gathering.
If it’s windy in Admiralty Inlet (the region between waypoints 002 and 006), it will typically blow from the south…from astern, in other words. Which would be fine, except I do NOT want to buck that tidal flood (the big arrows pointing to the left, representing current pushing against my course), especially with wind-against-current.
So what if I left earlier, at 0900? 
Hmmm, that’s not so bad. Still a little contrary, though.
What if I got the family up really early, in time to untie the boat just before 0800? 
Now we’re talkin’! The current is either slack or in my favor the whole way. Looks like we’ll need to set our alarm clocks Friday morning! Either that, or sleep on the boat the night before.
Obviously, you don’t NEED Coastal Explorer to figure this out on your own. You can do it with pencil, paper, and a tide/current table. But it sure is handy to see it on the screen like this.
Technically, this feature isn’t even complete yet. It’ll be interesting to see how it evolves over the next few weeks.
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Wow that’s really cool. Makes me wish I had a boat.
Very cool feature. Just last night I was trying to manually figure out the best time to head up the Hudson in April from NYC to Albany. A lot of trial and error later I think I have it worked out. I can’t wait to see Maptech release their version 2.0 so I can spend more time with my family instead of planning! (although there is a certain enjoyment to the research)
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