Bread crumbs, indeed. Our travels on this cruise, in fact, every time the boat moves, are guided by our chartplotting program. For non-boater readers, it can be likened to Google Maps. Our position is shown in real time overlaid on a chart of the area. If it shows waterways, it’s a chart, maps show roads. The chart shows land features, water depths, obstructions, and ATONs, or Aids To Navigation, that are anchored to the bottom and mark bouyed channels, hazards, or speed restrictions. Waterborne road signs, if you will.
Our chartplotter is actually a PC-based computer program, it displays all the data that the various systems on board collect such as depth, position, course over ground, speed, heading, wind speed and direction, air temp, water temp, AIS data for nearby vessels, and many other pieces of information. The program also keeps track of our position continuously, and lays down a bread crumb trail of our movement, or track. Those tracks are data that can be viewed, manipulated, exported to other programs and recalled. It’s a timeline record of exactly where we were at what precise time. Although the location map on the blog shows a location related to each post, it doesn’t show how we got there. The graphic below shows our tracks (in red) for the time we were in Georgian Bay and North Channel, for a good depiction of our travels. The grid on the chart is lat/lon, each line is 20 nm (nautical miles) wide by 30 nm high.
North Channel -Georgian Bay tracks
