Organizations supporting our recreational boating community

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Let's begin with some basics. "A Scout's Guide to Boating Knots" was written and created by local Boy Scout Troop 325 to share what they learned in their Sea Scouting program project, covering important seamanship and boating skills. This article covers common and useful boating knots, terms, and a guide in safety. Thank you Troop 325!  2019

The NOAA BookletChart™ is an experimental product that you can print at home for free. They are made to help recreational boaters locate themselves on the water. The Booklet Chart is reduced in scale and divided into pages for convenience, but otherwise contains all the information of the full-scale nautical chart. Bar scales are also reduced in scale, but are accurate when used to measure distances in a BookletChart.  For charts of other areas: Atlantic Coast, Gulf Coast, Pacific Coast, Great Lakes.

US Coast Pilot. – All nine books of the Coast Pilot, FREE, on-line. A series of nautical books that cover a variety of information important to navigators of coastal and intracoastal waters and the Great Lakes. Issued in nine volumes, they contain supplemental information that is difficult to portray on a nautical chart such as anchorages, currents, tide and water levels, prominent features, dangers, routes, and Federal regulations applicable to navigation. Coast Pilot volumes 8 and 9 covers Alaskan waters.

Explains all the symbols on charts. Why pay? https://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/publications/docs/us-chart-1/ChartNo1.pdf

COLREGS. The official navigation rules of the road. These make for interesting reading, and are the ultimate authority on such items as whether the seaplane has right of way over the submarine. One MB PDF file.

American Practical Navigator The classic and comprehensive reference on navigation. Updated yearly. Serious boaters should have a copy of this onboard. 

Free Nautical Charts! Your tax dollars at work! These are the SAME source materials that go into your printed charts. You may download RNC (raster nautical charts: scanned images of the original charts) or ENC (electronic nautical charts: vector-based charts created from the originals and with much more information).

OpenCAPN – A Chartplotter and GPS Navigation Software for Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista 7, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and Macintosh OSX. OpenCPN is a free software (GPLv2) project to create a concise chartplotter and navigation software for use as an underway or planning tool. OpenCPN is developed by a team of active sailors using real world conditions for program testing and refinement. OpenCPN is a good place to start if you're undecided on electronic chart plotters.

SeaClear II – A free, full-featured Windows-based charting program that displays Electronic Navigational Charts from the U.S. Government. It works with GPS input, too, converting your laptop into a chartplotter. http://www.sping.com/seaclear/

Nautical Almanac: Regardless of what method of celestial navigation one uses, essential information can only be found in the Nautical Almanac.