Seattle, WA   August 15, 1999Number 6



We have moved!

Seattle, WA, August, 1999 — We are very pleased to announce that after 20-some years and three different rental locations, we have finally moved into our own property. See a glimpse of the building at About Starpath. This important investment allows us to optimize our resources and provide even more cost-effective products and efficient services.

Our new product Bowditch Plus! is now available. This includes all of Bowditch on one CD plus the full set of chart symbols (Chart No.1) and a full set of the Navigation Rules, International, US, and Canadian.


  

New links

Seattle, WA, August, 1999 — We added a short description of the plotting technique we recommend for fast GPS position plotting and have also found and added a new link on legal matters from the US Army Corps of Engineers. They call it their Legal Tool Box and it is just that. We have also updated our notes on running Starpath software on Macintosh computers.

A new presentation of the Notices to Mariners (NIMA) is now available at http://pollux.nss.nima.mil/untm/. These are the international products from NIMA, not the Local Notices to Mariners from the USCG. Many other resources can be found at this link as well, but we have not had time to surf around yet to report them.

In the "Coming soon&quod; department: we soon will add a wonderful geometric proof of the Pythagorean Theorem — which is, after all, what we must ultimately rely on to define the distance between two points. This has hung in our office for years, and we just realized how easy it would be to share this with the world via the Internet.


  

US Coast Pilot Updates now Online

Silverspring, MD, July, 1999 — We are a couple months late in announcing this, but NOAA has now made available the full updates to the US Coast Pilots on line. For a long time, we had the Local Notice to Mariners on line, but never the Coast Pilot updates that were included as appendices to the paper editions of the LNM. We have encouraged NOAA to make these available on line many times and now we got word they are there. See Critical Corrections at http://critcorr.ncd.noaa.gov/. It is a very well organized presentation. Thank you Marine Chart Division.

Unlike Light Lists and Tide Tables that we must purchase every year, if we have access to these updates we can use our Coast Pilots for several years in a row. This new service makes this possible for many more mariners than before, and at some $20 per volume this is significant.


  

New Edition of Kayak Navigation

Seattle, WA, July 30, 1999 — The third edition of David Burch's Fundamentals of Kayak Navigation is now available. This edition keeps this book in the vanguard of nav texts — it is not just for kayakers but for any small craft navigator. This edition contains a new section on internet references, expanded GPS section, and, to keep ourselves grounded in the traditional, we have invented an all new piloting technique for figuring position from the seat of a kayak without the use of the hands.

  

New Starpath Chart Problems Available

Seattle, WA, July, 1999 — NOS discontinued the training chart for the mouth of the Columbia River. It has been replaced with the Eastern Strait of Juan De Fuca. We agree, this is progress. Unfortunately, we used the latter for our practice problems for 20 years! So we had to make all new ones, which is now completed.

If you order our home study course on Inland and Coastal Navigation you get these new ones and won't know anything of this history. But if you have purchased this course some time ago, and would like more practice, you can order these problems and the associated chart by themselves. It is a good set of problems that will test of your navigation skills. All necessary table selections are included.


  

New Resources from NIMA

Washington, DC, July/Aug, 1999 — NIMA is working on a very extensive online marine navigation web site. Most is not ready yet, but check their page periodically to see how things are coming along. Their main link is at www.nima.mil, and from there use their search function to find marine navigation ... that section moves around a lot. Lately the index has been at this location for marine navigation section.

They have many nice features planned, including full Bowditch text, and even Chart No.1, plus numerous online computations for navigators. Note that our own new product that we call Bowditch Plus! includes all the text of Bowditch (fully searchable), the complete Navigation Glossary, Navigation Tables data, all of Chart No.1, and the Navigation Rules (US, International, and Canadian) will be available at the end of August on one CD for $49.95. We will announce it here when ready.


  

Attention Great Lakes Mariners...

Toronto, ON, Summer,1999 — We have added a new book to our list. An excellent treatment of marine weather of the Great Lakes. See Wind, Weather, and Waves. It is from Environment Canada, who also produced a wonderful book on marine weather of British Columbia.

  

<< Previous Edition -- Next Edition >>