Avoid crowded, noisy anchorages with sQuiddio's new Superyacht Dodger layer

Imagine booking an ocean-front room and discovering there is an 18 wheeler parked in front of it!

The number of superyachts, which are commonly defined as vessels over 30 meters (110 feet) long, has quadrupled in the last 30 years and there are almost 6,000 of them now at sea. You don't have to sail the French Riviera or the Florida Keys to spot one of these behemoths of the sea: they are now just about anywhere. If you are a billionaire, or are willing to shell out the $100K+ a week to charter one, or are just someone who enjoys that type of scene, have at it. After all, you have the same right to be there as the rest of us cruising mortals do.

But for most cruisers, the sight of one of these monsters approaching our anchorage to drop their anchor - often not far from where our boat is - is one of the most dreaded cruising experiences. And for good reasons: their huge silhouette can block out the beautiful scenery we had just begun to enjoy, their bright lights, often constantly on, can ruin that unique star-gazing experience we were looking forward to.  And what to say of the constant din of their generators? Or the loud parties with music blasting until the wee hours? Or the jet skis, the banana boats and the other noisy water toys which seem to be part of the standard carriage requirements for a these super stinkpots?

Finding superyacht-free anchorages

Sometimes I feel like finding an anchorage free of superyachts has become part of my standard route planning routine. And because helping with route-planning is sQuidd.io's mission, we have created the Superyacht Dodger layer: simply put, the layer will highlight all the Points of Interest (marinas, anchorages etc.) where a superyacht (or the occasional large cruise ship, another unwelcome companion of many an anchorage) is currently checked in. The presence of at least one of these types of vessels will show up in the map view as a small red icon overlaid to the POI.

Here's an example of what a section of the French Riviera around Cannes on a typical late July day appears when the layer is active. We have deliberately chosen arguably the busiest of cruising spots to show that, even in these circumstances, there is some hope of finding a reasonably quiet anchorage!.

 

As always, please let us know if you find this new feature helpful, what could be done to improve it and, in general, how you feel about this particular issue as a cruiser, by adding to the comments below.

New: One-click download of Satellite Maps for any Point of Interest

 

Enhance your charts with the visual cruise-planning benefits afforded by satellite images. View detailed satellite maps of marinas or anchorages.

If you have ever approached an unfamiliar marina, or anchorage, with a slight apprehension due to insufficient or outdated details on your chart, fear no longer. With the latest release of the sQuidd.io plugin, you can now download up-to-date Google Maps satellite images directly from OpenCPN and watch them render right on your chart, perfectly overlapping your raster or vector chart.  

Google Maps download for sQuiddio Points of Interest (POI) has been available for sometime from the squiddio web site. For OpenCPN users, however, this approach required a few extra steps (locating each POI on the web site, selecting the zoom level, copying the KAP file to the correct OpenCPN chart directory, updating the chart database).

You can now zoom in on one or more marinas, anchorage or any other type of sQuiddio POI, right click on the chart and select sQuiddio: Download Satellite Images for POIs from the contextual menu. Wait for the chart database to update and there you have it!

The how-to...

If you don't have the sQuiddio plugin installed, OpenCPN version 5.2 has a easy new way of downloading plugins in a semi-automated fashion through their new Plugin Manager (if not, you can always follow the instructions on the OpenCPN page).

Once you have the plugin installed and activated, to download Google maps for a set of POIs:

• Zoom in/out in your viewport so that only the POI(s) for which you want to download maps are shown
• Select sQuiddio: Download Satellite Images for POIs from the contextual menu. A separate map is downloaded for each POI and for each level of zoom specified in the Download tab of the plugin settings. The plugin follows the Google Maps zoom levels, the default values being 17 ( ideal for, e.g., seeing the layout of a marina ) and 15, useful when planning an approach to an anchorage or marina. You will be provided an estimate of the size of the compressed file to be downloaded, and asked to confirm the download.

The Chart Database will be automatically updated when the download is complete and the Google Maps will appear on your chart (Note: if you have created a Chart Group for your Google Maps, you may have to close out and relaunch OpenCPN in order for the maps to show)

To change the zoom levels of the Google Maps to be downloaded, as well as the directory where you want your maps saved (maps are saved as raster files in the KAP format), click on the sQuiddio plugin icon in the toolbar and go to the Download tab

You can also choose to download a Map to cover the entire viewport, in addition to the individual POI-specific maps. See the option Include Viewport Map in the Downloads tab