Recommendations for a route planning program

[Sticky Fingers]

Wow, that's some draft! You can set a safety depth in Navionics (ie keel plus your preferred margin)

 

[pcatterall]

https://www.savvy-navvy.com/ does this, tidal and weather routing etc. It's aware of TSS, will keep you in channels for port entry etc. Not sure I trust its routing round Portland however.. so I would double check / hint it with additional waypoints. It has a pretty good crack at it though, at least from my noob perspective. Be nice to have it able to work backwards from tidal gates etc but you can quickly adjust start times and see what pops out. They are working hard on it, and something like this is going to be a very serious tool eventually even if this is slightly early days. Can export the waypoints but I just roughly slap a few into le ancient plotters.

I'll have a shufti at this. My interest now is a bit academic as we are sailing in Spain. I recall sailing down from Preston to Pool where we were just day sailing, so lots of stops. Although we had done a rough plan for the whole trip in advance I still spent a lot of time each day ( due to delays and weather) planning in detail the next days sail, the crew were just straight in the shower then down the pub leaving me among the charts and tables! I suppose even 10 years on things are a bit easier!

 

[stu9000]

The advantage of Navionics is that you can work out routes on the PC and they then sync to the tablet and phone etc. The tablet goes under the spray hood. If I'm off watch I can keep an eye on things with my phone. This gives the crew autonomy but maintains safety. I would not be without this now.

In addition to the free web app and the £30 a year android app I did spend £150 ish on updating my plotter Navionics micro sd card as I was hoping to be able to export the routes from the tablet to the Raymarine plotter. But I could not get it to work. Im not paying £150 + every year for the Ray plotter to have map updates when I tend to use the tablet more anyway (plotter at the helm, tablet under the hood).
Ive tried opencpn with VMH charts. Good free package and if I had a PC based nav set up on board I would invest some time in it, but Navionics works very very well. I hear what you say about sun and not being waterproof but several devices on board provides redundancy. The desktop PC web version of Navionics is great for way point route planning but its annoying that it doesnt have the same tidal data on it that the app has. Not that big a deal though as have the tablet open alongside the PC to workout tidal gates.

Ill try some of the alternatives suggested in this thread but the combination of being able to plan on the big screen PC and then sync to multiple mobile devices is hard to beat.