Planning sickness

Planning trips is something of a sickness I have. Sad to say, but the fact is that I plan way, way more trips than I actually do. Whether it's a day trip on the weekend or an overnighter somewhere along the coast it's still the case that finding time to go is always difficult. Still, plan I do.

Over the years the tools I've used for planning have varied. As little as a few years ago getting (real) charts on a computer screen was something of a pain. And getting tide and current information on the same chart was something I had a really hard time finding. These days of course there are all kinds of choices, at least in the U.S., for getting NOAA chart and Google maps mashups. The final frontier was a decent tool (set) for my smart (read "i")Phone. I have I don't know how many tide and weather apps, current apps, ship finders, and so forth. Just a bunch of disparate tools that I can potentially use to plan in quite fine detail some outing that probably won't happen. But nothing cohesive, no "one app to bind them all".

The smart/iPhone situation has changed though. I happened to spend some time with Ben Lawry while he was at the GGSKS. In addition to being a pretty damned fine coach Ben has the (I say) admirable quality of being something of a gadget geek. He has an iPad and a smart (not "i") phone and turned me on to an app from a company called Navionics. For $10.00 it has downloadable charts that auto stitch, has tide and current info on the chart, a community layer (they call it) where it looks like you can add your own icons to the chart and share them, and a entirely livable UI. You can plan and sport routes and it will create exportable tracks using the GPS.

The number of tide and current stations is a bit lacking, the charts are a little jagged edged at large scales and a little cluttered at small scales. I wouldn't want to plan a serious multiday with it and I guess Navionics wouldn't either since it has a big green "Not for Navigation" type warning when the program starts, but for those "hey, what should I do this weekend" questions, or over beer what abouts, it's totally reasonable. Hell, I thought it was worth $10 just to not play Angry Birds or whatever quite so much. Getting something I can plausibly pre-plan a trip with on my ("i")Phone is gravy.