During the week of August 28th, we performed a field test of Coastal Explorer. Our voyage took us across the notorious Columbia River Bar near Astoria Oregon, 40 miles off the shore of Washington, to the fishing ports of Neah Bay, Washington, Uclulet, British Columbia, Bamfield, British Columbia and on a route 15 miles offshore back down the coast of Washington and over the Columbia Bar to Astoria Oregon for a total trip distance of over 400 nautical miles.

Planning Mode

The first step was to setup our offshore route to Neah Bay. The process was very straight forward and familair using windows drag and drop functionality. After the route was plotted to Neah Bay, we could immediately see our expected time enroute and predicted arrival time based on our anticipated departure time. This planning feature was a big help in planning our departure time over the Columbia Bar as we had to time our departure at slack water on the flood tide. It was also easy to adjust route legs by simply selecting the leg and dragging it to a new position.

Cruise Mode

Once underway we switched Coastal Explorer to cruise mode. While in cruise mode Coastal Explorer displays ETA to destination, time to next leg, as well as all information on our seatalk network (converted using a NMEA bridge). The ability to see all seatalk information was invaluable as we could see at a glance our course, heading, true and apparent wind speed, water depth (including a history graph) and speed over ground (SOG). Having AIS and MARPA target information plotted directly on the navigation chart helped make our crossing of the busy Straight of Juan De Fuca shipping lanes safer and less stressful.

Special Features

While we were anchored at Effingham Island in Barkley Sound Canada waiting for the weather to break, we didn’t have enough clearance to let out the proper 7:1 scope, so we used a little known feature of Coastal Explorer to help ensure we didn’t drag our anchor during the night. We set a waypoint over the anchor with an outer proximity alert of 50 yards. This setting would sound an alarm if Sea Sharp drifted outside the set 50 yard radius. There are many navigation packages that will perform this function, but Coastal Explorer had the most impressive presentation I have seen. You could literally see the boat inside the guard zone and it’s position in relation to the border of the zone. Fortunately we didn’t drift outside the zone that night and began our journey back to Oregon in the morning.

Conclusion

Of all of the features contained in Coastal Explorer, the most important was the way in which you interact with the user interface. For years I’ve wondered why most all marine navigation software is hard to use. After all, isn’t marine navigation software supposed to be intuitive and easy to use so you don’t have to think about how to perform a function if you’re caught out in weather?

The folks at Rose Point Navigation Systems have got it right.

They clearly understand how to design software that’s intuitive and easy to use.
Coastal Explorer performed as we would expect any critical component of our navigation and safety equipment. We relied on Coastal Explorer for our safe navigation and more and it performed flawlessly. We’ll be using Coastal Explorer on all of our future voyages.

*Special Note: MapTech Chart Navigator Pro is Coastal Explorer repackaged for sale by MapTech with the addition of bathymetric charts. The retail price of Chart Navigator Pro is currently $499. If you have any questions or comments about our reveiw, please email navhelp@navsoftware.com and we’ll be sure to respond promptly.