I have since bought the Navionics chart regions through X-traverse for iNavX for both South America and Central America for $15 each and plan to buy the South Pacific and New Zealand in a few months. Long story short, the iphone provided the BEST navigation data we had available for that particular harbor. When we left I again was up on the bow, but this time I had my iphone in my left hand and a radio in my right giving directions to the helm based on both the iphone charting and my eyes on the water.
Once anchored, I looked at our track on the three chart sources and noticed that there was one coral head that we had dodged that ONLY showed up in the Navionics chart data on my iPhone, and the track we ended up taking layed almost perfectly over the suggested entrance route drawn on the chart (actually, the suggested route looked better than that how we came in slightly). On the way in I had my iphone in my pocket, while standing on the bow pulpit, but was paying more attention to looking for coral heads. On my iPhone I had the Navionics vectors running through iNavX. On the computers we had imray raster charts from about 10 years ago as well as brand new CMap Max Vectors. It is a difficult entrance through a break in the reef with lots of coral heads strewn about. On the way down to Cartagena, we pulled into Mayaguana in the Bahamas for the night. I have been meaning to post myself about some of this stuff, but have been spending too much time trying to sort out some sort of air conditioning for the boat. I’d also like feed back on the image gallery, please does this work better than the straight Picassa albums I’ve used recently (like the one at the bottom of this Lowrance HDS entry)? I’m sure I missed lots of details in these programs, but hopefully commenters can fill in. In fact, I got a bit carried away with the screen shots, and also figured out a new way to put them up on Panbo, as you can see below. And I’ve assembled a super duper screen shot slide show to illustrate… None is perfect by any means but the three above - Navionics’ Mobile Gold, GPSNavX’s iNavX, and Navimatics’ Charts & Tides - each has some interesting features. But I’ve been trying the major existing apps (thanks to a loaner 3G from Navionics), and can tell you that they’re pretty seductive as is. So there’s a new iPhone, the 3G S, and some of its new features - like a built-in compass, voice commands/feedback, and a much faster processor - will no doubt benefit marine navigation applications.
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