charting

Did you know that some areas of the U.S. coastal chart you're using may only show land and bottom features accurate in position to +/- 1,600 feet, and you shouldn't be confident about the depth soundings either?

Personally I have no problem going electronic-only when transiting familiar waters or inland waterways. But I love maps and charts. In fact as I typed those six preceding words, I looked up lovingly at the map of the Caribbean basin above my desk.

Yup, you're going to be able to easily collect soundings as you cruise, if you want, you can watch the resulting high def sonar chart materialize in your wake.

With the help of Google, Torqueedo electric power, solar panels, and a specially designed multihull boat, the Baykeeper project is hard at work photographing some 500 miles of coastline around the San Francisco Bay area.

An estimated 70 percent of the trash sinks, and much of it is tiny bits of non-biodegradable plastic floating out of sight just below the surface creating what NASA calls the 'Garbage Islands.'

NOAA’s quest to better understand the world’s seafloor continues, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has committed two of its ships to collect and update chart data in the Arctic.