Robert Livingston said: "United States charts are now free... available for Windows... GraphicConverter... For the Macintosh user" I can vouch for the fantastic resource of having the US charts available online. Not only did I not have to expend large amounts of cash for them (there were lots of other things to spend the $US on ;-) - but I could get them immediately (for planning purposes) on the far side of the globe. For the Alaskan trip, we edited the big chart (image) files down to a series of about 25 A4-sized (metric 8.5 by 11) 'chartlets', so that we could annotate and laminate them. I have always liked having about 25 km of distance on a page on deck - that seems to give me about the right combination of detail & 'big picture'. Creating my own sheets of this size also lets me insert a harbour detail into an unused corner of the page - or include some notes about tides or VHF channels, etc. Then putting two pages back-to-back (inside the lamination) is good - as you then have roughly a day's paddle in hand. I think the laminating machine and 100 sleeves cost me about what one or two real charts would have cost. I found the process of turning the BSB raster files into PNG (image) files pretty painless - and then edited them (cut & cropped) to suit myself. If you chose to do this sort of thing, I find that there is benefit in establishing a scale that pleases you and then sticking to it. That way, you can readily & quickly estimate true distances from your chartlets - without having to get out a ruler - or bother with embedding scales within each page. If you work on your cropping, each page can be standardised to be 'n' km or miles wide or tall - allowing easy eye-balling as 'half a page' or 'one sixth of a page' while paddling - easily good enough for kayak estimates of time & distance. Not sure if it's been mentioned, but the US charts are also available (certainly for Alaska & likely for much of the country) from NOAA in 'BookletChart' (all one word) form - which breaks the charts down into a multi-page PDF file with 'chartlets' similar to the ones I make for myself. Of course, you have to accept their choice of scale and their selection of what to fit on each page - but it may save you some work... These booklets also contain relevant passages from the local Pilot, relevant Emergency info, etc - which makes them worth a look (while trip planning) - even if you chose to roll your own. Best Regards Paul Hayward, Auckland, New Zealand *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Mon Jan 17 2011 - 02:46:58 PST
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