Online Cruising Guides?

[ssullivan]

I think this has been asked before, but I can't seem to find the thread. Amgine has one...


I was wondering where I can find a good online cruising guide that will take me up the entire East Coast. Since I'm going one way (for now), I didn't want to shell out for all the divided up cruising guides at Blue Water Books.

I did get Skipper Bob's (RIP) Intracoastal Guide, but... I still need info like:

*Where can I go ashore and what facilities are there?
*Where is each and every inlet, so I can go outside?
*What is the nearest place to fill water and diesel?

Some of this is answered in the Coast Pilot publications, but not in great detail. I was hoping for a site that shows a few extra tidbits, like "bring your dinghy over here and find XXX", or "you can tie up for a minute and fill water tank here."

[Chuck Baier]

Unfortunately Sean, that kind of info will cost you. Perhaps others can point you to individual sailors blogs of recent ICW trips for some good info. One bit of info I can provide regarding guides. Over the years we have used Doziers guide for the waterway. We have found that generally the information is way out of date. There are bridge names that were changed ten years ago they are still publishing. Land side and marina information is also way out of date. We compared the current guide to one we have that is five years old and there is very little difference. In our opinion not worth the price. We pretty much could determine what we needed from just our charts. We use Skipper Bob and Claiborne Young and that is it. I know you need to shell out a few bucks but we find in those two cases it is worth it. Another source for you is our friend Tom Doves site at
Tom Dove Home Page
so perhaps others can add more. When do you plan to head out?

[ssullivan]

Thanks, Chuck!

I plan to head out on or about April 1st so I don't freeze. ha ha No heat in this thing yet.

I do have Skipper Bob and I'll take your advice and try to find the other guide. I suppose I'll just have to "go with the flow" and fill up with water when I see a marina. I would like to go outside as much as possible because I don't like radioing bridges, and sailboats don't like motoring up ditches.

[Chuck Baier]

Sean, Have a look at our perspective of the waterway on our site at
Voyages of Sea Trek: Changes In The ICW
and see why we prefer going outside. we will leave Houston in about three weeks, heading for Beaufort, SC for now. Claibornes site is
Salty Southeast Cruisers' Net ~ Your home for all the cruising news along the ICW

[ssullivan]

Originally Posted by Chuck Baier

Sean, Have a look at our perspective of the waterway on our site at
Voyages of Sea Trek: Changes In The ICW
and see why we prefer going outside.

I read through and found that your experience was exactly what I was imagining it would be like. Also, after doing the Erie Canal, I'm not a big fan of motoring down ditches. I enjoy sailing and open waters.

So... I guess I'll just study charts and follow weather staying outside as much as possible, unless something is a real short cut, or I have nasty weather.

Thanks for the tips. Very useful. I'm getting antsy (not sure how to spell that) to leave... as we all do when we are done with one place and ready to move onto the next.

[camaraderie]

Sean...for the inlets between Miami and Norfolk get Dodge's Guide to SE US inlets. Has charts, waypoints and pix for every one.

[GordMay]

Aerials Only Gallery has photos of most East Coast inlets, and many AICW locations.
Go and search your local(s):
Aerial Photography of the United States and Caribbean by Aerials Only

[ActiveCaptain]

Originally Posted by ssullivan

I was wondering where I can find a good online cruising guide that will take me up the entire East Coast...

ActiveCaptain will give you marinas, anchorages, and a ton of "local knowledge" markers. It covers the East coast, West coast, rivers, bays...and has a building database of international data too.

It's completely free and has no advertising. It sounds like it's just what you're looking for.

[ssullivan]

That's one of the ones I was looking for!


Thanks, Jeffrey. Maybe it will help me on my trip back to Maine. Or if you don't want me there, take the site down fast!

[ssullivan]

Originally Posted by ActiveCaptain

ActiveCaptain will give you marinas, anchorages, and a ton of "local knowledge" markers. It covers the East coast, West coast, rivers, bays...and has a building database of international data too.

It's completely free and has no advertising. It sounds like it's just what you're looking for.

Ok, after maybe 3 minutes of signing up and looking around inside Active Captain, I found EVERYTHING I was looking for.

It showed my anchorage, gave ratings on my anchorage, tips on where to land the dinghy and where the marinas and grocery stores are.

There are also reviews by users of various places in the database.

To say I'm impressed is an understatement. Do you have ad revenue or something, Jeffrey?

This site is amazing.

One improvement that I'd find pretty handy:

I'm looking at my anchorage and found a great spot to land the dinghy to go to Publix. It would be nice if I could drag the cursor across the map to get approx nautical miles from one "marker" to another "marker" on the map.

[ActiveCaptain]

It's kinda lonely up here in Maine this time of year. Hurry up and get here quick!

[ActiveCaptain]

Originally Posted by ssullivan

To say I'm impressed is an understatement. Do you have ad revenue or something, Jeffrey?

This site is amazing.

Thanks for your comments.

There's no revenue for the site at all. My wife and I are cruisers and had the tools and ability to build the site. It started as a small idea of keeping track of our anchorages and grew into something much larger. We based it all on the things we wanted when we were in our boat cruising between Maine and the Bahamas.

We just released (last week) the first version for mobile phones. It currently supports Palm devices (Treo's and Centro's) and provides a real chartplotter in your pocket. The performance is amazing - you really need to see it to believe it. It works with NOAA charts that are all available on the ActiveCaptain site for free. We update all the charts every 6 months. I just signed a bunch of contracts with UKHO for international charts and I have all of the data at my desk now. We'll be releasing UK, NL, and Bahamas charts first. A Windows Mobile version is almost done (alpha testers have it for displaying charts now), and an Apple iPhone version is being designed and built. The software isn't free but it does run in a trial mode so you can see exactly what it does on your own device - again though, only the Palm OS version has been released.

We're hoping that the small fees for the mobile software will fund the web site. The web site is running on a dedicated server and is costing a few thousand dollars a year to run right now.

The Palm Centro is a wonderful device for all of this. It is currently free for AT&T and Sprint via a special deal at Amazon. Even if you go directly to AT&T or Sprint, the phone only costs $99. It handles email, light web browsing, and is an incredible tool especially if you've never had a higher-end mobile phone. And of course, it runs our software beautifully (supporting GPS and connection to the web site for viewing all the markers over nautical charts).

The "Going Mobile" section of the web site has a lot more information and video tutorials showing the speed of the software. The video capture process distorts the color of the display but you can get an idea what it looks like. Nothing beats trying it in trial mode on your own device though!

[ssullivan]

Wow. Very interesting.

I have a Treo on board right now and may give it a shot. However, my iBook G4 (Mac) is my primary navigation tool. I have a Sprint EVDO unit, which will allow me to use Active Captain from the helm, as I use MacENC to navigate and NOAA data too.

It's amazing what opens up for navigation, weather and information help when you have the internet at the helm... just amazing.

Great site though. Maybe you could drop a few Google Ads in there to at least offset some of that server cost - like the Cruiser's Forum does? Just a thought. I'd hate to see a resource like this scale back. I can't wait to contribute some useful data.

Good job.

[caribnsol]

I concur on the Active Captain, very nice site. Wrote 2 marina reviews and added some comments.

[ActiveCaptain]

Originally Posted by caribnsol

I concur on the Active Captain, very nice site. Wrote 2 marina reviews and added some comments.

That's the secret behind it. We've hopefully made it simple enough and fun to use. If everyone updates their own area (or areas they go to) with reviews, anchorages, and facility information, we'll all have the data when we go outside our known areas.

We're just about to have our 6,000th captain and recently crossed 200,000 updates by users. We're currently getting 1,000 updates per day for different types of data.

I think it reached "critical mass" around November when we started getting a lot more updates and added the entire Coast Pilot data to all the inlet markers. Those inlet markers now give general cruising information about a harbor or area.