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From: Craig Jungers <crjungers_at_gmail.com> subject: [Paddlewise] Navigation for both Power and Paddle Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:38:39 -0700 · This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:33:49 PDT

I'm a retired merchant marine officer and over the years I've squirreled
away surplussed navigational charts from the various vessels I've worked on.
These charts include some for places I'm not likely to paddle (Singapore,
the Red Sea, Capetown, etc.) but since I spent a lot of years cruising a
small sailboat I thought that I might just as well take the charts home as
throw them away. So I have over 100 pounds of charts covering almost every
area of the world that a tanker, a drill ship or a workboat might find
itself navigating.

Luckily, I have a 1700 square foot workshop with a loft to store these in.
The problem is that, as a paddler, my needs for navigational charts are way
different than my needs were as a officer on the bridge of a drill ship or
tanker. Or even as a cruising sailor. In fact, I have conflicting needs.

Last year I made a conscious decision to get a kayaking "mothership" and
spent a lot of hours following the various craigslists. My selection, a 1974
25-foot Carver Santa Cruz is about the largest boat that can be trailered
conveniently (well, conveniently if you have a 3/4 ton diesel pickup... the
boat and trailer weigh just at 7000 pounds without fuel, water, or personal
gear aboard). It has a single gasoline engine for reasonable economy and is
8-1/2 feet wide so it can be stored in my yard during the winter months for
maintenance and modifications but moved to whatever cruising grounds I want
to visit for less than monthly slip fees. If done right, the personal kayak
mothership can provide a comfortable homebase for kayaking in a wide range
of geographical locations; even with the current high fuel prices.

But now I have a somewhat unique problem. I have to navigate both a 25-foot
power boat *and* kayaks and they each have a set of very different
navigational requirements. Kayaks generally cover from 5 to 20 nautical
miles in a day but the powerboat can cover that distance in an hour or less.
A kayak likes to travel close to shorelines to take advantage of eddies and
avoid traffic while my mothership really likes to stay away from the
potential rocky areas close to shore. As a paddler I can go for hours with
only an occasional reference to navigational charts but as the operator of a
pretty fast powerboat I need to stay right on top of where I am and what
might be in the way of where I'm headed. So in a perfect world I would have
two separate navigational systems: one for the mothership and one for the
kayak.

It turns out that even in a perfect world two navigational systems are
expensive. My options are to use one of the old fashioned navigational
systems or to go electronic; or a combination of the two.

Manual or "Old Fashioned" Navigation

This is pretty much the way we used to navigate. Paper charts sold by the
Government, chartbooks which cover relatively large areas, or area
"chartlets" which cover specific paddling destinations. Their batteries
never go dead at an inopportune time but they don't have built-in lighting
either. To use them properly you need plotting tools which are difficult to
use on the deck of a kayak but work well in the cabin confines of a
mothership.

1.Paper charts are the standard charts you would buy at any marine store and
are the same as those I used the bridge of ships. Their advantages include
the fact that you can write on them and can update them easily just by the
Notices to Mariners. But they are not waterproof and they are big and, worse
yet, they cover areas in weird chunks with different scales so that one
nautical mile on one chart might be an inch but on the next chart it might
only be a quarter-inch... or two inches. They are extremely expensive; if
you are planning a trip up the inside passage from Seattle to Alaska the
navigational charts alone could cost over $1,000!

2. Chartbooks are usually sold to cover a specific geographical area like
the San Juan Islands, Puget Sound to Prince William Sound, San Francisco Bay
and the Sacramento River, etc. These generally come in a spiral binding and
are sometimes printed on water-resistant paper. They might have courselines
printed, and photographs of harbors, passes, marinas and other features. The
advantage is that they often cover a large area at a very reasonable price,
they can be updated, and you can write on them. But they're designed for use
on power cruisers and larger sailboats so to use them on a kayak you would
either have to copy them or rip them apart; thereby reducing their value on
the mothership. Another potential disadvantage is that in some areas, namely
Canada, they are illegal for use in navigation. Legally, if you have one of
these, you must also have the (expensive) government charts too; or some
electronic equivalent. They are, however, inexpensive in comparison to paper
charts and an entire area might be in one chartbook costing about $60 at a
marine supply store.

3. Area chartletss are what I call charts that are designed to be used by
paddlers. They are small enough to put under the bungees on deck with a
scale designed to be detailed enough for kayakers. Area charts often show
launch ramps, restaurants, campgrounds, etc. They can often be purchased in
a group (San Juan Islands, etc.) or one at a time (Orcas Island area, San
Juan Island area, etc.). They're generally not as easy to update but are
very waterproof. The detail can be greater than you'd need on the mothership
but they are still very usable. Unfortunately, they seldom have pages
showing you how to get to the area they cover. These are available from
several (often localized) providers usually cost about $10 on an individual
chartlet basis or a group for about $50 or $60.

Not so long ago electronic navigation was a dicey proposition. Starting in
the 1950s you could use electronic devices for navigating (Omega and Loran A
and Loran C) but you had to convert time-based coordinates into latitude and
longitude and then plot them on your paper navigational chart. It wasn't
much different than taking a sight with a sextant, reducing the sight, and
then plotting the results. Captains were very happy to see plots because
they liked to see things on a chart; even if it was not very accurate it
generally wasn't that important anyway (well... not when you were well out
at sea). When the "Transit" system of navigational satellites was introduced
in the 1970s it became much easier. This system used information from
passing satellites to give you a position in terms of latitude and longitude
that you could read right off a screen and then plot on a chart. It was a
position that was maybe 30 minutes out of date, but, again, that wasn't such
a big deal and the Captain could still see the position plotted on a chart.
About then Loran systems for larger vessels began to have displays that
showed position based on an area with tracks and waypoints.

It wasn't really until the advent of GPS (Global Positioning System) in the
1980s that pure electronic navigation began to take shape. Magellan offered
a hand-held model that was water-resistant and floated that could actually
monitor your course towards a destination that would allow you to correct
for tide and wind influences. This gradually morphed into what we now have
today: devices that display their own versions of detailed navigational
charts that you can hold in  your hand. What's more, they often have tide
information, compasses and barographs built in. There is now a plethora of
both hand-held and permanently mounted GPS units on the market that do
everything but make lunch.

However all is not rosy in the electronic navigation front. The detailed
navigation charts for these units are generally not included in the original
price so must be purchased separately and can be quite pricey; especially if
one needs them for Canadian waters. The electronic charts themselves tend to
be proprietary and restricted to specific brands thereby locking you into
that manufacturer if-and-when you upgrade. The charts themselves are often
impossible to update and your only recourse is to buy an entirely new set.
The media the charts themselves come on varies from CDROMs you insert into a
laptop and then upload into the GPS unt to small memory chips that plug
directly into the unit itself. Some GPS units can accept downloaded charts
in some flavors (raster scan or vector-based). Worse yet, as your GPS unit
ages the manufacturer may move to a different - and totally incompatible -
method of providing the charts that forces you to upgrade to a new system
just to get the updated charts. Craigslist and eBay are full of these older
units.

My choices in the electronic category are:

1. One hand-held GPS for both the mothership and the kayak. This is the
cheapest option but, as usual, there are both advantages and disadvantages.
There is only one learning curve, only one set of expensive charts, and the
devices are small and easily carried from one area (say, the wheel house to
the flying bridge to the kayak cockpit) to another. There are drawbacks
though. One has to have some method of powering the unit on the mothership
(or run the risk of running out of batteries) and the small size of the
screens can present a problem to older paddlers; especially in a kayak
cockpit where reading glasses might not be exactly conveniently at hand. In
addition, the GPS would track not just the kayak trip but the mothership
trip as well. If you are like me and keep your season's paddling on a GPS
then it would inevitably become mixed in with the travels of the mothership.
The total price of this solution, including detailed charts for the USA and
the western coast of Canada would be about $600. This is less than
individual paper charts but lots more expensive than the chartbook solution.

2. A handheld GPS for the kayak and a mounted GPS device for the mothership.
This can be a much more expensive option as the mounted GPS systems can cost
over $3,000 (or more). They do, however, offer a system of sister devices
that can display results on one reasonably small screen. Radar data, depth
information, speed and mapped position can be displayed at any given time.
Some now include photographs of the area a la Google Earth. All this
complexity comes at a price and not just in money. Power draw, while nothing
like it once was (especially for radar systems), is still a consideration on
a small powerboat. And mounting of all those antennas can be problemmatic on
anything that has to be towed on a trailer down a freeway and under bridges
and overpasses. The major downside for this solution is the price of
detailed electronic maps for both units. But you would not need as expensive
a handheld for the kayak since you would no longer be "voyaging" in the
kayak but simply exploring the nooks and crannies of the area where your
mothership is safely anchored. So a reasonable GPS unit (with "fish finder"
capablities built-in) and map would be about $1,000 plus $200 for the
less-capable kayak GPS. Not much more than the paper charts alone.

3. Another direction would be to buy a navigational charting system for my
laptop (the one I'm writing this article on right now) and use that and its
built-in (and mostly free - at least for US versions) charts on that. There
are at least three different computer-based nav systems on the market.
Maptech, Nobeltec, and Tiki Navigator. All of these use downloadable
navigational charts for US waters and all can accept charts purchased for
Canadian (and other) waters. Prices range from under $175 for Tiki Navigator
to upwards of $700 for Nobeltec with the additional expense (about $100) of
a GPS receiving unit that mounts somewhere on the mothership and connects to
the USB port of the laptop. Charts themselves are easily updated by
downloading newer versions (again, for free - except for Canadian waters)
and the laptop can be placed on a nearby dinette table thereby reducing by
at least one unit the number of devices mounted on the steering console. Of
the two-GPS solutions, this is probably the least expensive if you already
own a laptop but if you don't then it quickly rises to the level of very
spendy, indeed. The advantages are that you probably use your laptop on the
boat anyway (or would if you had one) and you'll have a navigational system
(some of them show current speed and direction in real-time) for as little
as $250. The disadvantage is that the laptop has to be secured against
motion-induced damage (e.g.: leaping from the dinette table in a big
seaway), it has to be powered somehow, and it might not be as easy to read
in brght sunlight. You can, however, move it around the boat. And again, the
handheld GPS need not be too sophisticated since you are not (presumably)
paddling long distances but simply meandering about on the waters nearby the
mothership. So $250 for the mothership unit and another $200 for the kayak
GPS for a total of $450. Not including charts for the Canadian waters.

Or I can have a combination of the two methods. I could use mostly charts on
the mothership and keep on using my handheld GPS in the kayak augmented by
the use of area chartlets for the places I paddle the most often.

Use of a mothership as a base of operations for kayak exploration seems to
me to be a natural progression in kayaking; especially since perfectly
suitable boats manufactured in the 1970s and 1980s are now available for
sale on the Internet at bargain-basement prices. My own mothership, for
instance, would cost over $100,000 to buy new today yet I'll be able to put
it on the water complete with electronics and a trailer for less than
one-tenth that amount. And my boat will sport LED lighting, a Webasto diesel
furnace for central heat (including under the bed and in the head
compartment which doubles as a gear-drying area, and a digital compass at
the helm. I have my own bed, a fridge, propane stove, a microwave, an
inflatable dinghy and an outboard for shore excursions (and for easy entry
and exit into the kayaks), a head compartment big enough to hang wet gear in
to dry, and a cockpit to lounge about during good weather as well as a fly
bridge to give me a better view of the surroundings.

The upside: more toys.

The downside: gas prices and more stuff to take care of. But hey, I can
still just kayak camp if I want to. No law says I have to take the mothershp
along.

Yeah, right.

Craig Jungers
Moses Lake, WA
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