The totally free SeaClear II PC based chart plotter with totally free NOAA navigation charts
You supply the laptop, netbook or pc and the gps that feeds it
(Click on the images for larger versions)


Screen shot made while under way of the approach outbound to the Humboldt Bay Entrance bar from the little EEE PC901 netbook running SeaClear II fed with a Garmin GPSMAP 60CS handheld.  The symbold of the boat is the arrow, and the course line from the bow shows a small dot near the rock corner of the spit which is where the boat will be in 60 seconds.  Stomper's guidance GPS is an Eagle Cuda 250 S/Map chart plotting fish finder used for waypoint and route navigation while the SeaClear unit is used for situational awareness since it's detail is greater than the Eagle plotter.  The portable aspect of SeaClear is useful for in-home review of the day's fishing tracks and for planning and reviewing your plans for those future tuna trips.  Stomper's third chart plotter is on the GPSMAP 60CS that feeds the SeaClear II plotter with NMEA 0183 data.  I rarely use the Garmin as a chart plotter because it's screen is so small.

This information is not really for those of you with the resources to have the best standalone dedicated chart plotters on your very nice ocean going boats. This is more for someone who doesn't have one but maybe has an old laptop laying around and can be resourceful enough to find a handheld or usb gps device to feed it information.  If you just need a chart on your vessel and don't have the room to roll out a paper chart, you can use this for that.  The power is released when it is interfaced with a gps unit.


Here's a recorded track from a Cape trip I did with some time spent at Blunts Reef.  I caught a halibut at the tip of that track by the 24 fathom mark, and rockfish after that on the reef.  These locations are exactly as I encountered them.  In other words, very accurate. I found that all of the submerged pinnacles show on the fish finder when I passed over them on this plotter.

The Sea Clear II chart plotter is a totally free, freeware chart plotter that is an excellent addition to any vessel wheel house as a backup system, a primary chart plotter, or as a second chart plotter that you can take into your house after a trip and review your day's trip track.  It's also a good program to have on the home computer to view tomorrow's tuna expedition.  It uses freely available electronic navigation raster charts from NOAA that are up to date and officially qualified as marine navigation charts.. The guy who wrote it did so because he couldn't find one for free.  He wrote this program and has been working on it for years, and it is an amazing piece of work considering he doesn't charge for it, and it's great functionality. 

I've included many screen shots of the program.  It works fabulously in the new 8.9 inch and 10 inch netbook portables now on the market for as little as 250 bucks.  I use a 300 dollar Asus EEE 901 with a 16 gig solid state drive and a 35 dollar GPS USB dongle.  It's rugged, but the key board can't tolerate water drops.  Ask me how I know.  It cost me 16 bucks to replace the key board.  I now protect the keyboard with cellophane wrap.  I have a complete collection of charts installed in it covering Southern California, Northern California and Oregon but have omitted the San Francisco and Central California areas until I plan to operate there.  All of this at no cost other than the netbook and the gps unit that feeds it.


These are the two laptops I use on Stomper.  The Asus EEE PC901 300 dollar netbook is on the left and the Panasonic CF-50 Toughbook that I bought for 275.00 is on the right.  I use the smaller one 95 percent of the time since Stomper is nothing more than a large jetski at 15 feet 10 inches.  Note the plot at the right is chart 18620 on the Toughbook showing a track from the jaws to the halibut grounds near the 51 line.  The little netbook on the left has the Garmin GPSMAP 60CS attached as it usually is on the boat feeding NMEA 0183 location data to the netbook.  It is showing the Coos Bay bar.  These can be zoomed in to very closeup views while under way.  The red location and speed status box on the upper left of each screen are red because neither is recieving real time NMEA 0183 data.  When the data feed is active, the red window becomes pale blue like the rest of the window and the box shows real time location, speed, course over ground and UCT time data.  This is a fully featured and functional chart plotter.  I will soon be adding a GPS USB dongle so that the netbook will be "standalone" portable without the Garmin hanging by a cable from it.  The GPS dongle will just stick out of one of the USB ports.

This is a fully capable stand alone chart plotter that can be configured to run on the laptop without external connections other than maybe a cigarette lighter plug charging adapter or something like that. The program should work in almost any laptop that can run Windows 98 through today's Vista and Windows 7.  I personally use Linux to run the program, the details of which I won't go into unless by special request.  I'll just say that even though it's written for Windows, it works just as well in today's versions of the various distributions of the Linux operating systems thanks to additional work by the author of the software.  The normal computer user would use Windows and the setup and use of the program is very straight forward.


Details of the Coos Bay Bar entrance.  Again, the red box at the left above means no NMEA 0183 output is getting to the plotter because I simply had the laptop in my house and brought this chart up manually instead of letting the plotter do it automatically, which it would if we were underway with a GPS in that area attached and feeding the plotter.


The beauty of this thing is many fold.  It's cheap, it's good, it's easy to operate, and nice to have.  It beautifully navigates all the narrow underwater channels of Humboldt Bay so you don't ground in a mud flat.  You could have it on an ultra portable netbook style 250 dollar laptop, use a 35 dollar GPS USB dongle unit plugged into the USB port, and record your next tuna trip while on somebody else's boat.  It's as precise as any dedicated chart plotter too.  You could also have an on board pc box stashed somewhere on the boat driving any size flat screen display you want, even a huge one, giving you a fully functional chart plotter with legal navigation charts.  Very small cube sized pc modules can be had intended for auto use that use 12 volts DC that would be perfect for this program.  If you've never owned a chart plotter and have the laptop and a gps with NMEA 0183 output capabilities and you navigate the bay with a small aluminum boat, you could put this on board and be able to fully view the bottom profiles.


Trinidad Head and Trinity Bay

Have you ever had a GPS chart plotter unit screw up, fail or have an electrical system failure disabling nav systems?  This unit with a GPS USB dongle can guide you into Humboldt Bay, Coos Bay or wherever you are if the proper chart is loaded.  It also can use normal NMEA 0183 output from any GPS device that can output that format and it will use it as the location information.   The plotter can also output the same NMEA 0183 data to an autpilot or whatever might use the information.  If the charts are properly loaded into the program,  the program will keep the proper chart moving under your vessel symbol, and it will automatically switch to the highest detail chart based on where it knows you are.  If you are coming into Humboldt Bay and are on the 18620 electronic chart (free from NOAA), then as soon as you enter the border of the 18622 chart for Humboldt Bay, the plotter will automatically switch to the 18622 Humboldt Bay chart with no action from you. 

As explained later, I created a chart image for the Eel River estuary from an aerial photographic image, calibrated the image with lat and lon info and loaded it into the program.  Now, if I approach the Eel River mouth and get close to it, the plotter will automatically switch to that chart because it is more detailed.  How cool is that?


I made this chart from a Google Earth screenshot and calibrated it using SeaClear's MapCal program which is included in the download.  You can obtain the upper left and bottom right coordinates while in Google Earth and then use them for the calibration.  You can use two known coordinates within the image and after two of them are entered on the image, it will be fully calibrated.  After I did this, during one of the recent wind blowouts preventing ocean fishing, I launched Stomper into the estuary and did some bottom mapping with the goal of having a little more information for those adventurous ocean entries from this location for trips to the Cape.  It is evident that it is an accurate calibration because you can see where I launched the boat at the ramp, and it's dead-spot-on.  I've used this ocean entry before but it's not for everyone.  It can be dangerous returning in fog with no nav aids to mark anything.  You absolutely MUST know about surf and how waves work.  I've surfed for 45 years and am fairly comfortable in the surfline whether on a board or in a boat.  The track shown here is one of those mapping missions taking depth soundings and documenting them.  This opens up the possiblity for any lake or river to be charted this way and used in this program. 


So, I just did the same with the northwest half of Ruth Reservoir.  No depth markings yet though.  I'll have to do that one of these days when I get the boat up there.  I wasted a bunch of time making the mistake of not orienting the image with North up, so my calibration of the chart failed big time and the result was really wierd.  this is a corrected version and works really well.  SeaClear II is a "North-Up" only chart plotter.  It does not twist the map around so you are "course-up".  I manually set the vessel speed at 5 mph at 303 degrees magnetic, so that dot in front of the vessel symbol shows where I'll be in 60 seconds.  The author says that he is working on making that change. Again, I inverted the color of the image and then filled in the lake with white so it would be much easier to see on the laptop screen in the day time.  This will be a pretty neat fishing tool and just a real neato "gee-wiz" thing to have on the lake.  I'm going to do this for the Klamath River also.

My fourth directional source is my dead reckoning magnetic compass, stop watch and low/medium frequency radio direction finders ( ancient old school stuff I learned in the sixties).

The Charts
The Sea Clear II plotter uses the NOAA raster charts that are free from the government online.  These are the electronic versions of the same charts as you buy in the marine supply stores.  For instance, the plotter uses chart 18622 for Humboldt Bay, chart 18623 for Cape Mendocino and viscinity, chart 18620 for  Point Arena to Trinidad Head, and chart 18605 for Trinidad Harbor.  To find them just Google search for "NOAA navigation charts".  As you route your way into the chart site, it might appear that you have to order and pay for something, but that's not the case.  Just follow instructions for downloading your charts, and you'll end up with a zip file of the charts you wanted, and then you can put them somewhere that you will remember where they are.  Loading them into the plotter so they'll do their automatic thing while your GPS is attached is a little wonky, but we'll get into the details later.

You can also create, load and use your own custom made charts.  The program can use any image file as a chart, and includes a program that is used to load the image and calibrate the top left and bottom right corners of the image with lat and lon coordinates so that it will be a fully functional chart.  I created a chart of the Eel River Estuary and Ruth Lake by screen capturing a Google Earth image of the estuary and obtaining the top left and bottom right coordinates using the Google Earth cursor, and then using that information to do a very simple calibration of the image.  The image was saved as a chart, and then it functioned perfectly during a mapping recon mission I did of the estuary during unfishable weather conditions in the ocean.  I was curious about the estuary as an ocean entry point, as I have used it in the past to go into the ocean.  I've never been able to find any bottom information chart sources for it though.

More screen shots.

Here's what it would look like if you were fishing 161 nautical miles at 235 degrees magnetic from the Humboldt Bay Bar entrance.  This is the Monteray Bay to Coos Bay chart.  Not alot of detail but it covers a huge area.  I have too many charts to mention on the little netbook laptop.


A Halibut hunt in the bay.  As you can see, this is very handy for finding the deeper channes to get from one channel to another.  It is the only good way in conjunction with a depth sounder to avoid grounding in the mud.  The tracks here were not sampling fast enough to show smooth curves because I had the program misconfigured at the time.  It has since been corrected.


The Brookings Harbor entrance.


Yaquina River, Newport, Oregon.  This is supposed to be a pretty gnarly bar.


I'll be working a little more on this, but all you have to do is Google search for SeaClear II and it will come up for you.  Good luck.