passage planning software (sailing)

[Phideaux]

Are you thinking of one where you told it where you were going from and to and it gave you various departure times and told you how long it might take, taking into account the wind forecast, aproximation of your boat's performance and tides, plus once you chose a time, it worked out a route including a guide on when to tack?

5 years or so ago I used Sea-pro, which did the above, but I remember it wasn't cheap.

Neptune Planner plus appears to all those things and more besides at £95 (including one chart - the UK is covered by 10 charts). For me, at the moment I only need the chart for the UK south coast and northern France so £95 seems a good deal. You can add more charts at £29 each or buy the whole UK package for £195. You get 14 days free trial.

 

[DipperToo]

I am also trying out several 'trial' download packages for passage planning.

Agreed that the Neptune outline planner does pretty well all of what one might need.

Has anyone tried PC Plotter (www.pcplotter.com) ? Interestingly this can interface to Navionics charts - a real bonus if your on-board system uses them. Apart from full tidal route planning (optimise journey etc) one can write the waypoint/route data back to the Navionics card for use in your main plotter. Neither the Raymarine or Navionics planning software seem to provide tidal calculations (as far as I can see).

Like to hear any experiences as this is a bit more than the Neptune product ( but about the same if you already have the whole UK on a Navionics card and need to purchase all the charts with the Neptune product).

 

[Cappen Boidseye]

I have and Iphone program from www.flytomap whichgives me full up to date charts on my Iphone, available offline for when there is no signal. This is a really good GPS plotting chart type programme but I am not sure it does route planning.
Having had a ten year old (pirated version- source unknown) copy of Seapro for sometime I have just taken the plunge and bought Seapro-lite. This is approx £100 and comes with full UK charts. If you want a full tidal database for planning that does cost more though.
It does not have the full route planning of the Seapro standard but I could not justify spending the extra to automate my planning.
I am very impressed with the standard of service from Seapro, ordered it on Thursday night, it arrived by the weekend. Installed it but the charts would not unlock. Within 20 minutes of my email for help I had a phone call back and was in business, the only problem was that the charts on the disk were only one day old, even newer than the instructions and unlock code!

I agree the interface is awkward until you get used to it, panning and zooming should be brought up to date, click+drag to pan and zooming on the wheely bit should be standard these days but you do get used to the interface eventualy.

Seapro, my Microsoft Autoroute GPS dongley thing, a freshly repaired laptop and an inverter for power, are going to live on my boat till the sea air destroys them, then I will probably spend on a proper cockpit GPS doodad.
Any thoughts on the best way to supply some volts to a car fridge and laptop when sailing? solar panels or a small windmill? which is cheapest and which is best?