NAV TOOLS to Go

Gear - For a relatively modest investment, a sailor can put together a portable navigation toolbox filled with apps that will be familiar to use.

- MARK PILLSBURY

After owning the same sailboat for a good long spell, I naturally became quite familiar with the electronic navigation kit, including our modest (by today's standards, anyway) Garmin chart plotter. That is to say, when I needed to, I knew where to find most of its features without pushing too many buttons or resorting to the dreaded user manual.

That's not the case, though, when I step aboard friends' boats and encounter less-familiar brands of plotters, often set up in peculiarly whimsical ways, or when I take the occasional charter and try to reset the previous skipper's preference for, say, chart soundings in fathoms or meters instead of feet.

And then there are those sea trials aboard newly launched sailboats that may or may not have calibrated instruments or even a cartography chip in the plotter, as was the case aboard a large cruising cat I found myself on in an unexpectedly shallow corner of Florida's Biscayne Bay.

Here's my take on Situational Awareness 101: Having easy-to-use, familiar nav equipment isn't just a convenience; it's a real safety issue when you suddenly find yourself tacking into unfamiliar territory or when sea conditions change unexpectedly. That's not when you want to go scrolling through pages of unfamiliar menus looking for settings and information such as tides and current.

As the Boy Scouts like to quip: Be prepared. And with relatively inexpensive prices for hardware and plenty of free or low-cost apps among which to choose, it's pretty darned easy to put together a take-it-with-you navigation toolkit that can double as a backup should the primary system on your own boat fall prey to the electron demons.

I've used the free navigation app iNavX for a while now. I have it on my iPhone (it's also available for Android) and use it mostly to check my surroundings underway, and to get an idea of what might lie between my location and the next waypoint.