25 BEST APPS FOR CRUISING
There’s almost nowhere the mobile phone hasn’t made inroads, and boats are no exception. Hundreds of sailing apps are now available. Chart viewing is among the most obvious functions, since we are already accustomed to using a dedicated screen aboard for that.
A repeater or a display for NMEA data is another popular use for the phone – hardly surprising when you consider that a basic plotter can set you back £1,000 and even an instrument display these days costs north of £500.
There are dedicated apps for these two key functions, and some of the better ones combine both so you can use the phone as a chartplotter. The enormous processing power of your mobile makes light of rendering charts.
Phones can also make light of heavy pilot guides. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting you dispense with your treasured sailing library, but their digital versions can provide a handy backup. A host of apps have grown up around providing key cruising data to enable you to get safely into a new port. These are often smart versions of familiar friends.
But they can go one step further than those beautiful hardcover guides that cost £40-50 a pop. That’s because they can be updated in real time and annotated by other users. From off-the-beaten-track anchorages to advice about the best cliff walks and the finest pint/sangria/rum punch – the social nature of cruising makes it ideal for crowdsourcing this sort of content. It answers a perennial complaint in my household, that pilot guides tell you how to get somewhere but not why to go there.
Like other crowdsourced info, the trick has been to find a light-touch way of moderating the data to ensure it is correct, clean and not libellous!
Chartering is the other obvious service that can be performed by apps. Think of
