Android sailing apps for full time cruising sailors 2014
After nearly 2 years and 15,000 miles with an Android powered Google Nexus 10 tablet here are my goto sailing apps. Since we are generally far form internet and data coverage all of these apps work offline, but many require pre-voyage downloads.
#1 SailSafe Pro anchor alarm. The alarm is absolutely piercing and will wake you up 100% of the time. Easy to use and a bargin for the price. If you have cell service and this app can even call a phone number to alert you of a potentially dangerous change in your vessels position.
#2 MX Mariner chart plotter navigator. For US waters it is superb as it uses free NOAA electronic charts. The user interface is simple and easy to use, yet powerful. We ran this from the Marshall islands to the Aleutian islands and throughout Alaska. Far better than Navionics for Android and as a bonus you can overlay Active captain info on the chart.
#3 Barometer Monitor keeps track of the pressure visually with a graph and also via a handy table.
#4 Pocket GRIB helps visualize GRIded Binary files or GRIB files. I rarely use this app as I prefer to download GRIB's via ViewFax (beta) and visualize the data using QTVLM
#5 Active Captain A powerful way to leverage crowd sourced cruising information. No local cruising guide, give Active Captain a try to see what's nearby. We used this all through Alaska and British Columbia.
