Posts: 14
Threads: 6
Joined: Sep 2023
Reputation:
0
Navionics has a very nice feature called dock to dock routing. The app uses its knowledge of your draft with its map/depth info to plot a course. This is handy for getting an eta when you are underway. It's a quick way to do course planning.
Is there a way to do this with OpenCPN?
Posts: 2,336
Threads: 21
Joined: Jun 2016
Reputation:
74
2024-07-07, 04:47 PM
(This post was last modified: 2024-07-07, 04:48 PM by seandepagnier.)
opencpn has weather routing. Unfortunately it does not incorporate chart depth. This is a rather not easy thing to do. I could do it but it could take me a while, and it would only be able to use vector charts not raster.
The dock-to-dock routing is honestly not a very good or useful feature because as far as I understand it does not account for the wind and currents. So it might route you a very bad course either directly against the wind, or requiring too many tacks. It might route you against strong currents when you could sail around them. It might route you in the wind shade of obstructions when a longer route would get you there faster. It might even route you in wind against tide where the conditions are either uncomfortable or even potentially dangerous.
What you need is weather routing that can utilize the nautical chart depth soundings, and eventually better resolution currents. Near land, I dont think the wind data is good enough anyway, so experience and local knowledge would do better since the data doesnt exist.