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 98 right through to Vista . It runs from the CD or it can be copied to the Hard Drive. What's on the Cruising Guide?
AN ENTIRELY NEW EXPERIENCE IN CRUISING GUIDES Over the past 5 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 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 were almost a degree of longitude wrong. We withdrew the CD-Rom version of the book as soon as we discovered these problems. 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. 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 in these countries. Sort of like a cruising guide for travel agents so they could become familiar with the tourism products they sold. 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, 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
Five years after we started, we bring you the ultimate cruising guide - the Nautical Rocket Guide to New Caledonia. The Nautical Rocket Guide to New Caledonia lets you see exactly where every anchorage is from satellite and aerial views. It gives suggested 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.). The guide provides detailed information on routes and anchorages throughout New Caledonia plus 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, and points of information. The Nautical Rocket Guide works on Windows XP to Vista. It does not work on MAC. 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. We supply the Nautical and the Tourism Rocket Guides to New Caledonia as a single package for US$150, including shipping. There is absolutely no other way you can get this kind of high quality information about cruising and touring New Caledonia. We also offer a 4-CD set of the Nautical and Tourism guides for both New Caledonia and Vanuatu for US$225. With this set you will have access to detailed information on cruising from Ile des Pins to the Torres Islands. Screen shots (reduced in size and clarity to make them faster to download) Start Here. For information on how to use the cruising guide, Click Here
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