Navigation

When we first bought Auspice, she had almost no working electronics on board. There was an old Ockam wind instruments system, an old PC radar and some other bits and pieces.

At first, we just used Navionics on our phone to navigate but I wanted a bigger screen to plan passages, as well as not relying on being online, or apps that can be updated or broken unexpectedly.

Commericial chart plotters are one option, but they are expensive, and more importantly rely on expensive and proprietry charts. Not such a big issue for local cruising where the charts are reliable, but in the South Pacific where we planned to visit - it seemed useful to be able to download charts, and offline satelite images from a variety of sources.

Luckily there is an alternative community, focused around providing free and open source alternatives for navigation software.

The most well known of these in OpenCPN. An open source plotting software available for most platforms (except iOS). I first tried OpenCPN by installing it on my Macbook, and with a cheap "usb GPS receiver", and after figuring out how to install some local chart files. I now had a place to plan longer and more complicated voyages.