Norway has to be one of the more confusing areas to navigate. There are intricate channels, thousands of reefs, rocks, and small islands, and lots of alternate routes. Add in a significant amount of commercial traffic and situational awareness becomes paramount. Our three monitor layout has been getting a workout.
We are testing Nobeltec’s latest offering right now, and the C-Map charts are a big improvement, in our opinion, over the Transas charts they used to sell under license. For the intricate work in coastal Norway we have the monitor set up with three chart views. Upper left corner is an overview of the passage. Below this we sometimes show close in detail, while the larger right chart is medium scale and OK unless we are in intricate areas, in which case we will use the mouse wheel to scroll in for more detail.
We typically set the Furuno 2117 radar to North Up True Motion for working our way through passages. This setting keeps the radar image of land fixed and has us and any mobile targets move relative to the land mass. This keeps chart plotter and radar in the same view.
You can do something similar with radar and charts in course up mode. But then you lose directional awareness. We prefer north up on both radar and chart displays.
The third monitor has the sonar in depth finder mode, to show us bottom trend. The abrupt change here from 1000 to 182 feet has our attention.
Posted by Steve Dashew (May 5, 2009)
