i-Boating: Marine Charts & Gps

I have a Garmin UHD Fish Finder / Chartplotter, but prefer to dedicate that to the sonar & use an iPad for navigation. I downloaded quite a few different apps to test their functionality and ease of use. I-Boating won easily. I’m fishing the lower Chesapeake Bay & coastal VA, and this app gives me all I need and then some. Very intuitive & simple to use, but highly detailed for navigation, routing, contours etc. That being said, there are a couple tweaks that would make it even better. First, the icons to identify waypoints or destinations are severely limited. I fish a lot of wrecks, but there’s no icon for wrecks or obstructions so I have to use the Fishing Reef icon for everything. Second, I sometimes use a different iPad or iPhone, and the data saved to one doesn’t transfer to the others. I thought maybe when I bought the US Maps it would remedy that but no luck. Last, in a perfect world you could draw/outline & identify a custom area. For instance I have a particular area of the York River that I like to drift over for flounder when the wind & tides are ideal. I wish I could circle that area & label it. But all in all still the best nav app I’ve seen.

I’ve used this marine charting program a few times on both the coast as well as inland lakes. It’s one of the few apps on my phone that includes excellent ENC charts for both offshore and inland navigation. Works very well with phones GPS even when outside of cellular coverage. Clearly shows where my boat is, how it got there and where it’s headed. I used to have this app as a backup to our onboard plotter. But I keep coming back to it since maps are more detailed and I am able to pull all the data from our boats NMEA network onto the app. Will post more updates as I investigate it’s more advanced toolset. Update: after 100s of miles and an year I find this app pretty reliable and useful. It keeps getting regular updates. Tide and currents plus wind overlay have been very useful. One thing I would recommend adding is support for auto routing. Aug21: Got an email from their tech support today to try out automatic routing in the application. Have been playing with it and it seems to work okay. I had to adjust the min depth to get the route I wanted. Definitely a good route planning aid. Edit: The latest update is very useful if you cruise the Tombigbee waterway. More detailed depths and more accurate. Tried hooking up this app today with our boats Ais transceiver over Wi-Fi. It worked well and showed all AIS targets around us.

Have used this app for years now. Have used it to travel from Texas City Texas to New Bedford Mass. and In Between. I’m a commercial fisherman and I’m all the time traveling, fishing different areas, and it’s my go to app at all times. 99.5% of the time it is dead accurate and I have had to navigate solely using this in dead of night with no other means to see navigational aids or water depths after my electronics were knocked out by a storm. I came in just using the app and a compass, nothing more. Did so accurately and safely. Week later after repairs I retraced the track I had taken based on the app information and it was exact on time, course, and marker position of all aids, and water depth was within 1.0ft average of the area. Very impressed and highly recommend as a backup system or even a primary navigation aid for experienced mariners who need a compact application. I will say not all movable cans will be 100% accurate at all times. That’s why I say it’s 99.5% accurate overall but the recommended channel and route has always been marked accurately or well enough I haven’t been grounded. But, as usual, always use precautions and read addendums regularly in any new area. I can also add that I have been in 4 hurricanes since I’ve had this app and after each hurricane it marked locations of potential hazards such as sunk vessels, logs, debris, navigational hazards, etc. within hours of the storm. Good luck and safe boating.