As NOAA recently announced their decision to sunset raster chart production over the next 5 years, some may find this useful.…

Many people are familiar with using apps such as Navionics for basic navigation.  To me, the functionality of such apps is often severely limited, almost more a toy than a serious tool.  That needn’t be the case.

Instead, I’d like to present some options for effective electronic navigation.  The challenge here is finding applications that support them, of which there are few.  My preference is an app called SEAiq; it has an enterprise version with even greater functionality, but we’ll stick with the more affordable recreational version for now.

SEAiq has a few particular tools that are quite useful:  the ability to create electronic bearing lines (EBLs), variable range markers (VRMs), mariner’s notes, and course vectors for both your own ship and for AIS targets.  Some of these can also be combined, for example you can attach a VRM to an AIS target.