Electronic Navigation Basics
October 18, 2025 · 38 min · 1K views
What this video covers
Tom Tersey, instructor at Maryland School of Sailing, surveys the full toolkit of electronic and paper navigation resources available to cruising sailors, covering both pre-passage planning and underway route tracking.
For pre-passage planning, Tersey walks through NOAA PDF charts (no longer updated but still useful as a reference), the NOAA ENC database (the authoritative, current design-configuration dataset), the NOAA NCC custom chart tool (which draws on ENC data and outputs a printable PDF up to 42×60 inches), the US Coast Guard Light List, NOAA Coast Pilot, and the USCG MSI app for querying Notices to Mariners.1:56 He stresses that ENC and NCC reflect design configuration only — a destroyed or missing buoy will not appear as absent until it is officially corrected, making LNM and BNM checks essential before any cruise.4:00
For underway navigation, he compares OpenCPN (free, Windows/Mac, natively uses NOAA ENC), Coastal Explorer (~$400, three-computer license), and Navionics (a Garmin subsidiary, mobile, proprietary charts).10:41 He explains three AIS aid-to-navigation types — physical, virtual, and synthetic — and covers AIS MOB devices.8:06 ActiveCaptain is noted as crowdsourced and therefore unreliable.31:30 ECDIS symbology differences between chart plotters and paper charts are flagged as a practical source of confusion.35:29
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