Nautical gps unit

[sandrac213]

Does anyone have one? And if so, how do they work on a cruise? DH is ALWAYS out on the heliport or balcony wondering how deep the water is, what island is that to the right of us etc. etc. Would like to get him an early christmas present for our upcoming cruises in a couple of weeks. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Happy Sailing

Sandy

[gamblingcruiser]

Hi Sandy,

I've always been interested in that also, but for a couple of cruises it's too epxensive. Not much help but did find a website you could start from:

 

http://www.boatpartsdatabase.com/leisure_marine_articles/Marine_GPS_Equipment.html

 

And you might have to buy "international maps" for the areas you'll be sailing through.

Joe

[Dett]

Does anyone have one? And if so, how do they work on a cruise? DH is ALWAYS out on the heliport or balcony wondering how deep the water is, what island is that to the right of us etc. etc. Would like to get him an early christmas present for our upcoming cruises in a couple of weeks. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Happy Sailing

Sandy

 

My DH takes his on every cruise. He has lots of fun with it. On one cruise, Coast Guard had to airlift someone off the ship. He was able to tell the speed of the ship as it slowed down and our location. Others around us were very interested in what he had and the information that he obtained. However, we are boaters so we use it at other times as well.

[Host Kewlguy]

We bring our GPS on every cruise. It's not a nautical GPS but will show you the speed you are traveling and the islands/countries that you are passing.

[cb at sea]

On RCI, they have a map with the ship's progress on the tv, showing what you're passing, how fast you're going....

Don't forget your binoculars!

[sandrac213]

thank you very much everyone for your help and information.Kewlguy,When you say a regular GPS unit, do you mean like a garmin GPS? Maybe i could just pick one of those up in the local Best Buy. Thanks for taking the time to help out.Sandy

[forensic]

We bring our GPS on every cruise. It's not a nautical GPS but will show you the speed you are traveling and the islands/countries that you are passing.

 

We were wondering about that, we are going to have ours with us this trip because we will be renting a car pre and post cruise. We wondered if it would tell us anything while we were on the ship. I wonder if we can put marine software on it?

[Host Kewlguy]

We were wondering about that, we are going to have ours with us this trip because we will be renting a car pre and post cruise. We wondered if it would tell us anything while we were on the ship. I wonder if we can put marine software on it?

 

Yes, we have a Garmin 650 GPS. We always bring it with us.

[crule]

If you have any GPS with a NMEA output (and the cable to go to your computer), you can slave that to a variety of mapping programs.

 

There are a few free ones out there - "seaclear" I think is one of them.

 

Garmin has a suite called "BlueChart" - and there's a very nice program from Maptech called "ChartNavigatorPro."

 

ALso, OziExplorer is another.

 

You can often get nautical charts for free by searching around on the web. You can get all the US Territorial waters from the Coast Guard's website in two different formats.

 

If you want to get really cool with GPS, you can do what I did on my last cruise and that's get you a radio receiver and a program called ShipPlotter. Not only do you have real time charting of you, but you also can see other maritime traffic around you at sea - know exactly that ship's registry, name, and usually destination.