Cruising Guide New Caledonia, Guide des mouillages Nouvelle CalédonieWHAT'S ON THE CRUISING GUIDE TO NEW CALEDONIA?This high speed, interactive electronic cruising guide operates on any Windows system starting with Windows XP right through to Windows 7. It runs from the CD or it can be copied to the Hard Drive. Updated and revised in 2009During 2008 and 2009 we re-visited and re-photographed 151 anchorages in New Caledonia and created 210 GPS routes to guide you around this fabulous south Pacific cruising area. What's on the Cruising Guide?
AN ENTIRELY NEW EXPERIENCE IN CRUISING GUIDES Over the past 8 years our Cruising Guide to Vanuatu available from www.cruising-vanuatu.com has been hailed as the best cruising guide ever produced. Well, even though we've continually upgraded the Vanuatu guide, this one is better. We did the first cruising guide to New Caledonia on CD ROM in 2001. It was a digitized version of the well known Cruising Guide book that has been sold in New Caledonia for years. But, when we started using the guide ourselves we quickly discovered it had many problems. For one thing the old guide did not show you how to get into many anchorages, let alone navigate between them. For another, the sketch maps often had little resemblance to the real world. But worse, the latitudes and longitudes offered were taken from charts and were not WGS84 compliant. Put these coordinates into your GPS and you'll be anchoring on reefs, in the middle of islands, or out in the ocean. The charts the original authors used for the waypoints had IGN72 and even older geodesics - but there is no indication of which version of which charts were used so it is impossible to apply a correction. Some of the waypoints used in the book from the NE part of Grande Terre were taken from charts done in the 1800's with the prime meridian through Paris, not Greenwich, England - and are almost a degree of longitude wrong. We withdrew the CD-Rom version of the book as soon as we discovered these problems. For an example of the difference between the Cruising Guide to New Caledonia book and the Nautical Guide to New Caledonia click here. CRUISING THE SOUTH PACIFIC FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS
Frederique and I have been cruising the south Pacific aboard our 44' Cutter Moira since 1976. We first came to New Caledonia in 1981 and have made over 40 blue water passages between New Caledonia and other countries (Australia, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa). As a Ph.D. marine scientist, I worked on environmental and resource issues throughout the South Pacific for over 20 years and was especially active in the development of interactive Geographic Information Systems using aerial and satellite photography. I have contacts with NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the government information and survey departments in many of the Pacific islands and we have worked closely with the key departments of the New Caledonia and French government agencies, including the Direction des Infrastructures de La Topographie et des Transports Terrestres (D.I.T.T.T.) Bureau de la Cartographie and the Service Phares et Balises, the CenNational d'Etudes Spaciales (CNES) and the Service des Methodes Administratives de l'Informatique (SMAI). After our experiences reality testing the existing cruising guides, Freddy and I decided to produce the most advanced, most user friendly, and most accurate cruising guides ever created - based on satellite and aerial imagery and advanced geographic information systems. We did Vanuatu first. A NEW KIND OF INTERACTIVE VISITORS GUIDE
When we introduced the Cruising Guide to Vanuatu in 2002. It was a great success and within a year almost every boat arriving in Vanuatu had a copy of our guide. The tourism offices of the governments of Vanuatu and New Caledonia were so impressed with this guide they asked us if we could produce a similar guide covering all the things to do, places to stay and general points of interest for touism in these countries. Sort of like a cruising guide for travel agents so they could become familiar with the tourism products they sold. In cooperation with the Vanuatu and New Caledonia tourism offices and We produced the Rocket Guide to Vanuatu and then the Rocket Guide to New Caledonia. We now distribute 40,000 copies a year of our tourism guides to travel professionals and travelers from around the world. Meanwhile, starting in 2002, we obtained satellite and aerial photographic coverage of every meter of New Caledonia's fabulous coastline, bays, creeks, and coral reefs. We explored and surveyed the anchorages aboard our 44' cutter, Moira. We analyzed the existing French hydrographic charts and discovered some of the charts for remote parts of New Caledonia are very hard to find, some are outdated, almost all have outdated geodesics, there is very little detailed information of anchorages suitable for yachts and all the charts now cost over US$50 each. We compared the exquisitely done older charts with the modern ones, and charts of differing scales with each other and with our own test soundings and real-time GPS positioning. We checked with the service that installs and maintains the lights and markers for the latest navaids and subscribed to the Notices to Navigators. We talked with other cruisers about their experiences and issues while cruising New Caledonia.
THE ULTIMATE CRUISING GUIDE
Eight years after we started, we bring you the ultimate cruising guide - the Nautical Rocket Guide to New Caledonia 2010. The Nautical Rocket Guide to New Caledonia lets you see exactly where every anchorage is with satellite and aerial views. It gives suggested GPS routes to go between one anchorage and the next and instructions for navigating in the lagoon and through the many passes in the barrier reef. The GPS points have been triple-checked and can be uploaded directly to your GPS to give you SUGGESTED guide points for routes and anchorages (The photo charts and GPS waypoints are NOT intended to substitute for official charts and you will have to agree to use the information as a non-guaranteed general guide. Prudent mariners must always cross check their navigation with all available sources and keep a careful watch.). This detailed information on routes and anchorages throughout New Caledonia will make your cruising experience in New Caledonia safer, more interesting, and more fun. We provide information on ports of entry, clearance formalities, weather, making passages to and from New Caledonia, tides, aids to navigation, official listing of marine charts, fuel, yacht services, communications, health, parks and reserves, tips for safe navigation and anchoring in coral reef environments, dive spots, beaches and other points of information. The Nautical Rocket Guide works on Windows XP to Windows 7. It only works on MACINTOSH computers that are set up to emulate Windows. The cruising guide needs to be activated. After activation, you can load the guide onto your hard drive or it can operate straight from the CD-ROM. The tourism Rocket Guide to New Caledonia works on Mac or Windows and does not require activation. There is absolutely no other way you can get this kind of high quality information about cruising and touring New Caledonia. If you already have the old paperback Cruising Guide to New Caledonia book and want to see a comparison between the Cruising Guide to New Caledonia book and the new Nautical Guide to New Caledonia Click Here. We also offer a 4-CD set of the Nautical and Tourism guides for both New Caledonia and Vanuatu. With this set of 4 CDs you will have access to detailed information on cruising from Ile des Pins in the south of New Caledonia to the Torres Islands in the north of Vanuatu. To see Screen shots of the guide (reduced in size and clarity to make them faster to download) Start Here. For information on how to use the cruising guide, Click Here
The Nautical Rocket Guides to both Vanuatu and New Caledonia are also available at the following locations: Noumea Yacht Services in Noumea, New Caledonia, Yachting World's Cyber Connect Cafe in Port Vila, Vanuatu Boat Books in New Zealand TransPacific in New Zealand 121 Beaumont Street, Westhaven, Auckland, New Zealand
ActivationThe guide needs to be activated on your computer - for details on activation click here
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