Testing emailing a photo to the blog, originally uploaded by svwindom.

As you might expect, we don't have any recent boat pictures on us...but
here's one of from the last trip of Windom just inside the reef at
Staniel Cay, looking north to Big Major's, as a test of posting photos
to the website via Flickr and Blogger. (test #3)

Anyway, with just over a month to go, Britt and I are starting to get excited about going cruising again. We've been researching and ordering parts, so we can have them shipped to the boat before our arrival. We've been making lists for what we need to do to shut down the house here. We've been scouring the web for new information since our last trip.

One amazing thing we discovered is that NOAA and Maptech have finally made electronic charts available on the web - for free! When we made the initial decision to go all electronic, we shelled out big bucks for the nav program, but then balked at the pricy charts. At $150-$300 per region, it added up in a hurry, so we did what everybody else did: we pirated them, copying other cruisers' electronic charts to CD and frantically trading to get the closest we could find to current. We justified this by the exorbitant cost on the items that were after all initially made with our tax dollars.

But now, I guess that charting has gone toward fancy proprietary formats and chips in GPS, and that's where the companies are focusing. But they need to digitize the charts anyway, and those of us with basic PC software (and hee, we used to be cutting edge, and now we're dinosaurs!) are reaping the benefits.

It's nice to have high-speed internet at home. We downloaded all of the latest, greatest east coast charts in a few nights. Of course, we ran into problems with our old navigational software; we'd been using Nobeltec 4.something, and they're up to 8 now. So we're upgrading, but to a different product: we're planning to use Rosepoint, which seems to be pretty amazing. Their free trial version (which doesn't interface with GPS) seems to be exactly what we're after. The full version isn't cheap - but with all the money we're not spending on charts, we can afford it!