Where do i find sea charts for sailing? (Baltic sea)

bremen15@feddit.de to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 82 points –

See topic. I want to use them with a Garmin handheld device. I can do transformations from, e.g., OpenStreetMap myself (with some instruction).

20

this is one of those things i wouldn't pirate. maps and weather are extremely important when sailing and having legitimate sources of these things is something you should be doing. you wouldn't pirate a first aid kit would you?

Yeah don't fuck around with stuff that your safety depends on, that's just asking for trouble.

Does paying for something make it better?

Or is that a capitalist illusion?

A movie? No

A piece of information that your life might depend on and you need to trust the origin of this information? Yes

Someone taking the title of this community literally ;-)

Not necessarily, Garmin probably wants to sell these. You can pirate while pirating.

I hope OP doesn't do actual piracy though, lol.

I've long used SAS.planet 🌐 to import maps from OpenStreetMap, Navionics or GoogleMap and then export them in Garmin format.

You'll have to scour specialist forums to find the right configurations/settings, but it's possible.

I would buy charts if you need them for life and death reasons but if you are open to using older charts for interest and leisure purposes you could use the CM93 chart set. This is a world wide set taken from possible copyrighted sources and crowdsourced info. Of course we cannot direct link to potentially copyright infringing files from here but this thread on cruiser forum discussing the charts may point you in the right direction.

Not sure if they work on garmin natively but they are fine with opencpn.

Remember they are about 10 years old and come with no guarantees.

Failing that openseamaps is pretty good, though lacks bathymetry data.

Is that a innuendo for piracy stuff or I'm too dumb?

It's meant quite literally. Sea charts are expensive, yo.

Been looking for some myself, my old nav has some ~20 year old charts, but I'm greedy, and I haven't sunk yet.

Pretty soon we'll be hearing from people asking about finding free planks to walk, peg-legs, treasure maps, trained parrots, eye patches, and rum. Yo-ho-ho!

I guess you already know how to sail/boat habe paper charts on board and just want a convenient way to get updated digital maps.

You could try https://map.openseamap.org/ but it will be limited regarding the information you get.

I tried pirating the training maps for the „Sportbootführerschein See“ (German drivers license for boats in German waters) and had no luck.

I would not bother pirating this for two reasons:

  1. The only valid maps (for German waters) are made by the „Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie“ and all maps are a licensed copy. They put a lot of work into maintaining and updating those maps and one way to maintain the infrastructure for safely traveling is paying for it.
  2. Your life could depend on an accurate map. The official maps I found were updated every 10 days. Would you risk it for a couple of €?

In the US, the Coast Guard puts out Local Notice to Mariners once a week, and will push one out if there is a new hazard to navigation reported.

If you're in anything larger than a small fishing boat, update your charts. Shit changes quick on the sea.