According to Boat US , the funding for NOAA to continue to convert paper charts to electronic format is in jeopardy with the reconciliation of a house and senate budget for NOAA. It seems the house bill is the one with the proposed cuts. Of most concern was a budget approved by the House of Representatives...

NOAA just (well I just found out about it) setup a new online chart browser of all their nautical charts, which you can access here: http://www.nautical-charts.gov/viewer/#OnLine From the list of charts you are shown two views of the chart one of the whole chart with a pointer to where you are on the...

NOAA announced back in August that it had PORTS data available for the lower Columbia . Well woop dee doo is what I thought because I had no idea what it is, so I dug in a little bit and poked around and ya know what its pretty cool! Basically you can now go to one site to find graphics of wind, air...

Under considerable pressure from user and witnessing the mass exodus of users to other free mailing lists, SailJazz announced today that they will lower their fee to $12/year or $4 a quarter. In order to do this they are also “electing to dramatically reduce the editorial content on the site. There is...

I have played around with USA PhotoMaps before, but not blogged about it. Essentially it takes satellite imagery and makes it available to you offline. This is handy for those of you who want to get a feel for the layout of an inlet, bay or marina before you sail there. I will caution you that the data...

OK, they beat me too it; Noel Davis and his wife (they’ve not mentioned her name) are over at Furled Sails and are now podcasting, congrats to them on being first! The show covers sailing news and interesting stories, recipes for cruisers, book reviews and a website of the week. The Davis’ are a couple...

According to Panbo , pretty soon the raster (scanned image) version of the charts will be free. This is cool, but raster charters aren’t quite as cool as ENC. ENC based charts are the one where you can zoom in\out and not loose any resolution because they are drawn on the fly by your software (or chartplotter...

I was checkout www.MarinaMap.com and I must say it was a little underwhelming. The basic concept is based on a clickable map or a Lat/Lon searches they will show you the closed Marinas. Well, I'm pretty sure Tacoma is DAMN far from Portland and Yaquina Bay, ORE. Either their search is bad or their list...

Engadget covers this story best... Sure, you could send out an SOS via telegraph or a mayday by radio, but why go through all that trouble when you could just paint your iPod orange? Because, afterall, according to the Canadian Department of Boating and Waterways, the iPod is an internationally recognized...