NOAA Nautical Chart On-Line Viewer

Thank you pete.

This viewer is the best thing (for a boater) since sliced bread.

Just a word of caution to anybody who wants to use these charts, read HOW TO READ A NAUTICAL CHART by Nigel Calder.

He goes into some of the problems using the electronic charts. Zooming is just one of the problems.

Thank you

Fred Heap
 
The NOAA charts available online are growing with updates every few days. I bought the FUGAWI program which uses both the raster charts and also the enc charts last winter. Checking back each month or so I see many many updates and also charts added each month. Mainly I wanted all of the river coverage afforded by the enc charts. More than 2/3 of all NOAA charts are now available online for free. The Fugawi program is a great laptop GPS program and a fair Pocket PC program. It will also print charts so you can have them in hard copy (with some limitations). I will use it when I go on the MS river this fall in addition to my regular GPS stuff. My laptop has bluetooth so I used a bluetooth gps "puck" and it worked great.

Mark
 
Thanks for the info.. It is very timely for my trip north to Lankford, MD from Va. Beach, VA.. It will be a great backup to my other charts.
 
Thank you so much for sharing. I have been looking for a online chart reference for awhile. I had a chance to play around with some local charts and posted one in my photo album today. Once again I've learned something new from this site.
Shaun
April05_Thumb_Beach.thumb.jpg
 
Another interesting NOAA page is their historic charts viewer, at http://historicals.ncd.noaa.gov/historicals/histmap.asp. You can put in search terms (typically names you'd expect in a chart) and it will come up with charts that date back to the 1840s U.S. Coast Survey.

Charts can either be viewed on line or downloaded in Mr SID format (highly compressed, but great quality). To view the downloads, you need to have a Mr SID viewer - link can be found if you scroll to the bottom of the page of results. Neat stuff.
 
Hi Folks,

Does anybody know how to PRINT charts from these sources on the internet?

I tried to print one of Nantucket Harbor. I now have a distorted enlarged view of Nantucket Marina that covers my icon page and picture of my boat. I can squeeze it to one side, but I don't even know how to get rid of it.

Fred
 
Other chart (and chart related) links (sorry some of these are only Pac NW):

http://apps.ecy.wa.gov/shorephotos/index.html (WA state shoreline aerial phots

http://mapper.acme.com/?lat=47.536917&long=-122.48722&scale=14&theme=Image&width=3&height=2&dot=Yes Acme mapper - aerial phots - (this link is zeroed in on Gedney Island outside Everett, WA, but you can enetr whatever lat/long you want).

http://www.topozone.com/viewmaps.asp Topozone - some of these have bathymetric maps.

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/bathymetry/maps/directdownload.html NOAA bathy maps - cool.

http://rocky.ess.washington.edu/data/raster/drgclip/seattle/index.html Lots of Puget Sound bathys

http://gis.ess.washington.edu/data/watiles/index.html WA state topos, some with bathys.

http://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/nsd/coastpilot7.htm Office of Coast Survey - source of not only the Coastal Pilot (which everyone should have aboard), but also Raster Nav Charts - similar to those in the link that started this thread http://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/Raster/Index.htm -- require software (http://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/Raster/resources.htm, many of which are free.

As to printing - 1) the software mentioned above and raster charts should help and 2) many of these files are TIFF or other graphics files. Many are large in size. What I do is download the file (usually unzip it) then open it with a decent graphics program and crop out the area I am interested in (a smaller segment) then print that - in pieces if I need to. You could also probably go to Kinkos and print on their large format printers.

Isn't the Internet great?
 
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