Cruising Sailors Forum Archive

I had both the Explorer and Navtech chart books....

the Navtech is better organized and the waypoints are accurate (and about the same as Explorer). However the depths, and the depths shown by Navionics were substantially off in many areas. Actually the Navtech a little better than Navionics (from their chart card on Raymarine). If you have a Garmin plotter, some of the depth information is from Explorer, but they pick and choose (according to the Explorer website). That leaves Jeppesen/Cmap as the only electronic source of Explorer depth data. Since I had nothing that could read Cmap cards, I bought the Jeppesen iPhone app "Plan2Nav" which has the Explorer depth data. It is a crappy app, but the data is good. In a few questionable spots I navigated by iPhone rather than $10K worth of Raymarine/Navionics stuff.

On the other hand, with 3.5' depth you can probably go just about anywhere without worry. At 6.5' we were limited quite a lot.

I would not go down there without also planning to go to the Exumas.

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