Active Captain

[sailorboy1]

I have nothing to do with this site. But I looked at it yesterday and joined and think with more people joining and doing location reviews that this will be a great resource. I don't about others, but the cruising guides always leave me up little info other than approachs that I can read just as wellfrom my GPS.

[four winds]

It's a great resource. I've been using it to learn about the Florida west coast in preparation for my first multi-day coastal cruise.

It's easy access to local knowledge types of info.

The admin is a member here.

[sailorboy1]

well, go ahead and make it too techie for me to deal with

it was enough for me to read reviews for anchorages, I'm easy to please sometimes

[Khagan1227]

I agree with Don it is a wonderful site (and thanks to you Jeff for your hard work), hopefully we'll be seeing a lot more people supplying area information on the NOAA maps. I too will start sailing from the "forgotten coast" in the near future and I'd rather not gain a lot of the wrong kind of experience from running aground, picking an anchorage where I'll have to move if the wind picks up etc.

[tlaw7]

Active Captain is a dynamite service/site. And, Jeff and Karen are ultra-customer oriented! I'm using it to plan my summer cruise to Maine. And bought my Coastal Explorer nav software from them. Very happy with both.

[CarlF]

My free Active Captain hat for my contributions to the Active Captain database arrived yesterday.

Excellent hat.

I don't go into an anchorage or a marina without first checking for comments on Active Captain.


Thanks Jeff.

PS - If I really work at this, could I earn more than a hat? For example, about how many reports would it take to get a new dinghy outboard?

[Therapy]

Originally Posted by Don Lucas

well, go ahead and make it too techie for me to deal with

it was enough for me to read reviews for anchorages, I'm easy to please sometimes

Me too.

It is good that even someone that does not know how to move (or even make) a route from a PC at home to his Garmin can use the site.

It is really nice.

[TimThornton]

Another crowd sourcing project that peopple may be interested in is TeamSurv - see TeamSurv - Home. This complements Jeff's good work by concentrating on depths - you log depth and position whilst sailing, then upload it to the web site where tidas and other corrections are applied. Immediate results are viewable online, and we are just producing chartlets for download in areas where we have sufficient data.

Have a look at the site if you are interested. Data can be logged using our software logger, or chart plotting software such as Nobeltec, or through our hardware logger. Although in the 1st year we concentrated on European waters, it would be great to widen the scope this year.

[brak]

Tim,

What data format do you expect for this? I wonder if this is something that can be built into PolarCOM (as a user selectable option).

Originally Posted by TimThornton

Another crowd sourcing project that peopple may be interested in is TeamSurv - see TeamSurv - Home. This complements Jeff's good work by concentrating on depths - you log depth and position whilst sailing, then upload it to the web site where tidas and other corrections are applied. Immediate results are viewable online, and we are just producing chartlets for download in areas where we have sufficient data.

[TimThornton]

The log file format is just standard NMEA0183, with the file name extension .TSV. It would be great if you could support this in PolarCom/PolarView.
For the output charts we are deciding which formats to support. As we aren't publishing full chart data, could you use a .PNG raster that can overlay on top of your main chart? Or S-57 vector data?
E-mail me at Tim.Thornton@teamsurv.eu if you want to discuss this further, so we don't clog up the thread.
Tim

[idpnd]

Originally Posted by TimThornton

Another crowd sourcing project that peopple may be interested in is TeamSurv - see TeamSurv - Home.

Very interesting - the possibility of doing this has been discussed around the forum. This would be excellent for getting the openseamap project off the ground. I assume the resulting data is publicly owned/creative commons licensed?

[TimThornton]

We're talking to OpenSeaMap, but there are technical and licencing issues.
The costs of what we are doing are significantly higher than OpenStreetMap in terms of needing to manufacture data loggers, pay commercial licences for some of the data like tide gauge feeds, have more powerful servers to cope with significantly larger data volumes etc, so to continue the project when our research grant runs out at the end of this year we cannot take a 100% open source approach.
Basically the processed data wil be displayed on the web site, and made available as downloads for non-commercial use, but we reserve the right to exploit the data commercially.