Savings on the water: iPad Navigation & Pilotage

Savings on the water: iPad Navigation & Pilotage

The Froo Gal crew has found a few ways to save money whilst on the water -- cruising in the UK:

1. Electronic Charts

Navionics on iPad
Copyright (c) SV Froo Gal 2014,
All rights reserved

Navionics provides a low cost set of electronics charts that make an excellent back-up for your paper charts. For cruisers like us who rarely venture out of the Solent and then not far from the south coast of England 23.99GBP -- for the UK & Holland chart set -- is money well spent to cut down on the frequency of chart updates for our Raymarine plotter. Add the Admiralty Leisure small craft folio (SC 56000 The Solent and Approaches) and you navigation needs are met for a very modest budget.

This year we paid a bit extra to buy the route planning plug in.  We'll perhaps comment on this, once we have had a chance to use it.

Not only does the iPad offer a neat navigation backup solution whilst on a passage, it is a perfect planning tool whilst on land.  Whether in the yacht club or at home we find this app convenient. Lugging paper charts around or buying duplicates are not attractive alternatives.

2. Electronic Almanac

We saved time and money by getting the Reeds Almanac for the iPad. Again, as we sail in a relatively small area, the ability to buy the region you need can represent quite a saving over buying a paper Almanac. Interactive features such as tidal heights, tidal streams and weather really add value and save time whilst afloat. We keep an old paper version and small booklets of tide times and heights for local harbours on the boat as a back up.

3. Hardware

LifeEdge iPad Case
Copyright (c) SV Froo Gal 2014,
All rights reserved

What about the marine environment? You may well ask. iPads are fragile at the best of times and the marine environment can hardly be described as benign. Waterproofing was our priority. We bought a LifeEdge waterproof case at the Southampton Boat show in the summer. Since then the price has come down quite a bit. The shocks and knocks on a boat and the practicality of using the iPad in the cockpit are our next considerations. We have just ordered a LifeEdge surface mount kit and a Scanstruct Rokk adjustable mount kit. We will use these to fix the iPad to the helm pedestal rail, near the other instruments. It should make an easy way to mount our iPad in the right place whilst being easily removable.




Recently we have also been experimenting with a low cost hudl (Android) tablet, purchased from Tesco. At £129GBP the the cost of replacing one is much more bearable than an iPad. Navionics have just released an Android version of their charts. We'll let you know how we get on with this frugal alternative.4. Free Pilotage Information
Sites like visitmyharbour.com and noonsite.com provide a wealth of pilotage data. It can sometime be stated more frankly than could be stated in an almanac on pilot book. These sites are more often than not sailing community forum. Make a contribution to the sites, share your experience and browse their ads -- help keep the sites free to use and up to date.

5.Weather Online
There are an overwhelming number of weather sites on line. We tend to use windfinder.com for short term forecasts and UGrib and passageweather.com for longer-term forecasts. Both of the latter use freely available grib files, which are the output of sophisticated weather models to plot wind speed and direction, pressure, and wave height and direction. Both can easily be used to create animations of the forecasts over several days. UGrib requires a downloaded application then grib files, used on a PC at home. passageweather.com is used from a browser, so is much more convenient aboard and can be used on a range of tablets, PCs and smartphones.


 Understand the difference between cost, price and valu