I just took a look and those are certainly much, much better satellite photos of almost the entire San Blas than existed just last year. Nowhere to hide anymore, I guess...

I get your point about paying a company and expecting the product to be accurate, but when has that ever been the case with charting products? Our paper charts of this area cost us 10x what Navionics charged us and they are much worse than Navionic's product and only cover Columbia and Panama. I estimate we would easily spend 100-200x the Navionics cost for comprehensive paper charts covering the same areas that would not be any more accurate. Heck, even Bauhaus's book of charts costs 4.5x as much for only the Caribbean side of Panama - and not even the whole area, at that.

You can protest Navionics for sure, but it is disingenuous to single them out when you are happy (or at least not complaining about) paying more for the same or worse quality product from others. Did you call or write the various government agencies responsible for surveying and printing the paper charts and complain about their product? What kind of response would you expect from them?

The Navionics charts are certainly far more accurate than the government commercial charts, so you made the accusation about repackaging without basis.

If one wants to cruise, one has no choice but to accept the "crappy" quality of commercial charts while waiting for better products to become available. How are you navigating at all without doing so? Do you have no charts of any type at all on board just out of principal?

Charting programs and charts get better by degree. There is no doubt that the Navionics charts are an improvement over what was available in this area before them - just look at the paper chart accuracy to prove that point. Are they perfect? Of course not - that is the point of incremental improvement. But to dismiss and ignore a product completely (let alone complain about it) until it reaches a state of perfection - a $15 product at that - is silly and quixotic. Particularly when the problem with said product is that it put you a few yards off when anchored up close to a shoreline.

BTW, Navionics right now shows us sitting in our exact slip in the marina and this entire dock was just completed 1 year ago! You use a very broad brush painting the product as bad when the only errors you have found have been in what is widely considered some of the remotest and most unvisited cruising grounds in the world.

When I updated to the current version, all my charts from the old version were retained in the device and they work just fine without internet connection. I just "took a trip" through the canal, up to Baja, and down to Ecuador - stopping and "anchoring" in many of the bays along the way and had no problems with charts or detail (I can't vouch for accuracy). I don't argue that you had a problem with your charts not being available, but it doesn't seem to be the universal problem you paint it, nor does the app require a constant internet connection to work, as you stated it does.

Just to be clear that I am not simply defending Navionics on the basis that those are the charts/app we use, we don't use the Navionics charts at all for navigation. I use the app and charts more as a portable atlas for armchair exploring and planning. The charts we do use have similar errors, omissions and problems as the Navionics - and some are much worse. That is the way it is out here.

Mark