Charts and Tides Marine Navigation App

The Charts & Tides app from Navimatics is a marine navigation app for the iPhone and iPad. It also runs on the iPod Touch - with live navigation if interfaced with an external GPS receiver like the Dual XGPS150 Universal Bluetooth GPS Receiver. Although not everyone will want to cope with the inherent limitations of vector charts, unlike raster charts in other apps, Charts & Tides offers many fine features for navigation. Some functions are a bit clunky, but it gets the job done and has features missing in some similar apps. But I wouldn't recommend this as your primary form of navigation, unless you ensure battery strength and protect it well with the Magellan ToughCase, which adds a GPS signal and additional external battery.

I'll confess first that I really dislike vector charts for coastal navigation - and that's my one real disappointment with this app. Having previously tested and used PocketNav, which uses raster charts in an navigation app for the same iDevices, I was quite impressed by how much navigational detail can be seen in a raster chart on the tiny screen of an iPhone. Pan around and see the names of towns, harbors, and rivers along with roads and landmarks - an easy way to stay oriented when planning a voyage. The same view in a vector chart in Charts & Tides usually provides much less detail, and if you zoom out you may see nothing but a featureless unknown coastline. Raster charts also provide information on navigational buoys, bridge heights, and other marine features, while on vector charts you typically see only an icon and have to click on it to get the detail. This lack of always-visible detail is one main reason why I rate Charts & Tides only 4 stars out of 5.

The advantage of vector charts, of course, is that they take far less storage space, so you can have the entire East Coast on your iPhone in just a few megabytes - and never worry about forgetting to plan ahead to load the right chart. That's just the start of all the features provided by this app. One of the best features is the inclusion of the ActiveCaptain Guidebook, which provides detailed information about marinas, anchorages, and other local features - integrated with the chart view. Symbols in different colors on the chart indicate different kinds of information available, and simply tap one to get the data. Learn more about ActiveCaptain here. In version 4.0 of Charts & Tides you can even contribute updates and reviews to the ActiveCaptain database directly from your iDevice.

The bullet points above list most of the key navigating features available in this app - far more that you'd expect from a little program running on a little screen. They all work well, despite some design oddities. It took a while to find the tides information, for example - it's placed on the bookmarks page, not some place I'd think to look if I hadn't yet started bookmarking locations. Similarly, the sun and moon times are accessed by tapping first the chart, then the latitude-longitude info bar. And don't even think about trying to read the User Guide on an iPhone screen - it's baffling that the designers didn't optimize what looks like a pdf file for the small screen. You practically need a magnifying glass!

Still, Charts & Tides succeeds generally at what it sets out to do: provide many of the features of a good chartplotter, plus added information of value for cruising sailors, in a nice little package that gives a lot of bang for the buck. If they continue to enhance the system in new versions, as they have so far, this will likely be the one to buy when you want all the navigational features.

Note: This app is presently available only for Apple devices. For Android devices, check these apps.

Note: It’s critical, especially when using a chartplotter app, to understand the accuracy of charts and be cautious around underwater hazards. Learn more about how to interpret chart accuracy when using electronic charts.