Charts for Upper Mississippi?

[Jdege]

I've not been able to use the Chart Downloader to load charts for the upper Mississippi river - Lake Pepin in particular.

When I choose USA NOAA & Inland charts -> ENC -> By States -> MN and do an Update, I see a number of charts I can download, but they're all on Lake Superior. Nothing for the rivers.

When I choose USA NOAA & Inland charts -> ENC -> US ACE Inland ENC charts and do an Update, I get an error: "Failed to download catalog: ... Verify there is a working internet connection"

[Gone Gypsy]

The army corp of engineers provides downloadable maps of the upper Mississippi River. Check this site and select the chart index. You are looking for charts 22, 23, 24 and 25.

https://www.mvr.usace.army.mil/Missi...issippi-River/

Fair winds, Mike

[Spot]

Thanks SJ2581.
A person might want #26 too.
The ACOE maps at first glance make the river look straight N-S until you find the compass roses...
Is there a not-too-difficult way to stitch the ACOE PDF's into charts for OpenCPN?

I have the DeLorme/Fishing Hot Spots Mississippi Pool #4 waterproof map that covers Red Wing, MN to Alma, WI that is a fishing accessory at gas stations and sporting goods stores.


Google maps view of the area below.

[Spot]

Messing around:
1. Donloaded PDF's from link above
2. Open a PDF in Inkscape
3. Rotate image until lat/lon lines look square to world
4. Draw rectangles to extend grid to corners of image
5. Output PNG file
6. Open PNG in Paint
7. Crop image to full grid squares and type in lat/lon for upper left and lower right corners, save to imagekap directory
8. Convert degrees-min-sec to decimal degrees
9. write batch file for imgkap.exe
10. run batch file
11. OpenCPN, force chart reload with imagekap directory as a path

So far I have done two. It's a bit tedious...

[Montanan]

Or you could just rotate the display screen of the tablet you are looking at to be oriented square to the world.

It is all about keeping a proper personal perspective.

[Jdege]

Originally Posted by Montanan

Or you could just rotate the display screen of the tablet you are looking at to be oriented square to the world.

It is all about keeping a proper personal perspective.

Or I could install one of these:

[Montanan]

https://tenor.com/view/compass-gif-5556526

[Jammer]

I was able to automatically download OpenCPN charts using the plug-in downloader. It's been years though as I didn't find OpenCPN useful.

The ACOE charts used by OpenCPN don't have contours. They really only show shoreline, buoys, and bridges. The Navionics charts are much better, especially for Pepin. I paid the $30 a year or whatever it was for the version for my phone. Worth it.


Garmin also has good cartography and hydrography for Pepin and the Mississippi.


The MNDNR "Metro River Guide" and "Mississippi River Guide" are free and are possibly useful. They show some parks and amenities absent from the other charts. Also useful is the Sportsman's Connection map book series as this shows public land ownership for adjoining land as well as public accesses with useful detail not present in other sources.

[Jdege]

Originally Posted by Jammer

The Navionics charts are much better, especially for Pepin.

I currently have the trial version of the Navionics app installed, and it certainly has more detail - complete contours, for example.

But I'm not sure they're any more accurate.

The MN DNR river guides are full of warnings about why you can't trust the charts outside the dredged channels, and their concerns certainly seem reasonable.

The river changes after every flood, and I know they can't be taking new soundings that often.

[Spot]

I have yet to take anything with OpenCPN out onto Pepin.
My fish finder/GPS is Garmin with the local maps with a small screen. I am more likely to have that and the waterproof map onboard than the tablet and GPS puck.
It is still very cool how Imagekap works and I have seen correlation of image to GPS down to 10-15 feet over 6 miles on some of my homemade local maps.