The fundamentals of nav apps aren’t very different, so what’s important is that it’s comfortable for you to use: on the yacht Emerald, Nicola likes Plan2Nav because it’s easy for her to share route files with her Furuno system. The nav apps I hear other cruisers using most are Navionics (primarily) and Garmin BlueCharts (distant second) a couple of others get mentions. I see ‘inadequately surveyed’ or even just ‘unsurveyed’ on a number of spots in our African destinations coming up…this will help. OvitalMap is a game changer, because it takes those hours (or days) of effort and turns it into a push-button activity. It requires a solid (and affordable) internet connection for an extended time. The process to get Google Earth views into KAP files we can overlay on OpenCPN is ridiculously time consuming. The app then caches these sat images so you can refer to it offline later. gpx to Ovitalmap, then asks the app to grab every satellite image along that route at a specified range of zoom level.

Tucker sets up a route in iNavx (you could use anything that exports a GPX file), exports the. We don’t have OvitalMap yet but this is top of my list of apps to try, thanks to a tip from Tucker of S/V Convivia. For real time navigation I prefer to overlay it in OpenCPN, but the app is still useful to scope out anchorage or snorkeling spots remotely or watch our live progress through an atoll pass. GE has been extremely valuable for us for atoll navigation this year, and often had more useful nav data than what was on our charts. Honeslty, we don’t begin to use the features of iNavx (grib file overlays!) …probably like a lot of other users. And iNavx connects to the NMEA 2000 network on board, the better to displays AIS data, uses our ship’s GPS and weather station data.

Other times we’ll find discrepancies in the charts: having two sources is handy…one is not consistenly better than the other. Sometimes we’d rather have eyes on the charts from the cockpit, instead of ducking below deck. But iNavx is more than just a nice backup. This isn’t our primary navigation system- we rely first on OpenCPN, with CM93 charts, running on a computer down below. This post has focuses on nautical tools- the next post will cover more general tools that make life easier on a cruising boat. To broaden the view from our personal favorites, I polled a few tech oriented cruising friends and got some great input from my tribe over at Women Who Sail. My intention here really isn’t to say what’s “best,” but to apply the cruiser filter and share what’s worked for us in three years of ipad use on board.

We’re “out there”: crowdsourced apps that rely on volumes of submissions for data often won’t cover the corners that distance cruisers need. Our internet access is often poor quality or expensive, or simply not even available. Or are most of those lists promotional placements (my cynical/marketing side kicking in)?A lot of the gap between apps hyped in the top ten lists and what we use as active cruisers can be chalked up to how different our lives are than many who cruise closer to home. Honestly? The first thing that strikes me after scanning a few is what the h*&# are those and who is actually using them?! And then I wonder, am I out of touch? (my nagging worry as a former gadget geek, tenured in the digital world). There are a lot of “best apps for sailing” type lists out there (I just looked. What are the best apps for sailing? What apps do cruisers actually use on their ipad / android to make life easier, safer, or more fun?

Seaiq android