[RainDog]

I am about to buy a bunch of east coast/Florida chart kits. Anyone used both Maptech and NV? Maptech are about 2x the price of NV. Is there any reason they are better?

NV paper charts come with free digital versions, which is a nice feature for the iPad. Anyone used them?

Finally, groupthink seems to indicate Explorer are far better than either Maptech or NV for the Bahamas. Any contrary opinions?

Thanks,

RD

 

[jerryRiggin]

Personally, we've sailed all over FL and the BAhamas using Navionics charts. They have been great because they 1. allow you to update them every day if you want (and they have an average of 1000 updates a week!)

and 2. you can submit changes to the maps if you want (called Community Edits).
They even have a version you can run on your computer in Windows8!

 

[bvander66]

Explorer charts for the Bahamas are by far the most prevalent, even to the point Garmin and C-Map have adopted them for their echarts. After 4 years of cruising the Bahamas they have never led me astray. In addition they have a lot of cruising guide info included. For plotter have never had any problems with C-Map in the Bahamas, other than we found some of the depth readings conservative (rounding down, eg 6.7' would show as 6').

For ICW we use the Maptech books, find them easy to use with their strip charts and their larger scale charts reach far enough out to cover the off shore hops. Newer versions come with a CD which allow you to do planning on your laptop.