The electronic charts are all over the place.
We enjoyed a long day in the sunshine today slogging along the Baja coastline. We plodded our way upwind for more than ten hours. It was good to charge the batteries and fill the fresh water tanks while making significant progress north. After we rounded the point into Bahia Conception it took us another two hours in a cold north wind to sail south again to our anchorage.
Getting into the anchorage was somewhat confusing. We knew where we were going, but were navigating with four different electronic chart sources. The boat's plotter has one source called CMAX, the laptop has navigation software called TimeZero, and my phone and iPad have Navionics and iNavX. And are all contradictory. The plotter is very coarse and wildly inacurate, so we have't bothered with it since arriving in Mexico. Time zero has better detail, but carries a large offset which makes it impossible to use under way while in Mexico. Navionics is more accurate, but shows the current anchorage as drying and generally can't be trusted for anchoring. The iNavX data that I downloaded from the guide book's website is a life saver. I don't know what we would do without it. Or what people did twenty years ago. Actually I do know: the same thing we did in Puget Sound twenty years ago: paper charts and dead reckoning. It's nice to have an alternative to reliving those days.
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