Online Cruising Guides?

[GordMay]

Tome Dove’s ICW: Tom Dove Home Page
An on-line guide, from the logs of cruisers, to the anchorages along the Atlantic & Gulf Intracoastal Waterways

[sctpc]

Well I would love something like Active Captain to come to Australia what a fantastic site,

[ActiveCaptain]

Originally Posted by sctpc

Well I would love something like Active Captain to come to Australia what a fantastic site,

The idea for ActiveCaptain came out of the cruising that my wife and I do - typically between the Bahamas and Maine. We grew tired of the lack of good "point-of-interest" data. We'd learn about some local knowledge of a really great anchorage after we had already passed the area. What we realized was that the informal dockside conversation among boaters was better than the data in any cruising guide or electronic chart POI data. What was needed was the mechanism for recording and providing the data to others.

ActiveCaptain in Australia? It's already there. ActiveCaptain is just a tool. We try to keep the data getting filled consistent and accurate. But the data comes from the users. We're averaging over 1,000 updates each day for US waters. They don't come from my wife or me. They come from our 7,000 users. There are a few in Australia and we have some markers there, but not enough to hit a "critical mass" to make it immediately useable there.

For Australia, a lot of this is our fault. We've done a poor job of getting the word out there. We've concentrated on the US and Canada. But that's just for now. In the meantime, if each person cruising in Australia would just fill in the local knowledge of marinas and anchorages that they know about in their own home port, the coastline would fill up quite quickly (the UK and Netherlands are good examples where it's starting to happen). Anyone can create a marker - and some have in Australia already. Check out this link which shows the Sydney area:

ActiveCaptain - Sydney

I welcome ideas about how to reach other countries and cruisers like you. We need help.

[sctpc]

Ok I will pass the info around and start adding, if I get my new cat I will be bringing it back from Nth Qld to melbourne 2000NM so that could put a start in australia thank you,
I have a Nokia 6110 gps Phone it uses Route 66 maps would that work with your moble

[ActiveCaptain]

Originally Posted by sctpc

I have a Nokia 6110 gps Phone it uses Route 66 maps would that work with your moble

I'm working on a J2ME solution for running on mobile phones that we don't support directly (direct support for Palm and Windows Mobile). Our direct support displays nautical charts and provides a real mini-chartplotter on your phone. The J2ME solution will use street map data at first. It looks like an end-of-year timeframe for the J2ME support. Any of the Nokia's, Blackberry's, Razr's, etc. would be good platforms for that software.

A 2000 nm cruise along the coast to Melbourne would definitely fill up quite a lot of that part of the AU coast!