Here is what's on the Nautical Guide to New Caledonia

• 60 photo charts created from Space or Aerial photos of all of New Caledonia, including the Recifs de Entrecasteaux, the Loyalty Islands and the Isle of Pines.
• 980 full color photos of anchorages, approaches, points of interest, coral reefs, beaches, including 360° and Virtual Reality Sphere images of New Caledonia's lagoon.
• 212 anchorages with razor sharp, survey quality aerial photos - includes every practical New Caledonia anchorage, including an overview, depths and navigational aids, sailing directions with GPS routes and approach photos, GPS positions of the best anchoring locations with photos of the anchorage and points of interest that often include virtual reality images of the beaches, coral reefs, and scenic overviews.
• 220 GPS verified routes and sailing directions between anchorages, including ocean passes, navigation through the lagoons of New Caledonia and anchorage-to-anchorage routes for day-hopping around all of New Caledonia.
• A program to upload the routes to your GPS or convert the routes to a format that your computer uses to communicate with your GPS or plotter.
• Ocean Routes to and from New Caledonia with tips on passages and weather windows.
• The location of lights, markers, leads and buoys with lights that flash with the correct sequence and timing and the distance covered by the lights shown on the satellite and aerial photos.
• List of all the official French hydrographic charts.
• Ports of Entry, Customs, Quarantine, and Visa information.
• Weather information on New Caledonia.
• Critical health information, including information on dangerous marine animals and recommended treatments..
• Marina information.
• Where to buy supplies, repair facilities and services of all kinds - from sails to cooking gas.
• Radio Communication services.
• Mobile phone and TV reception (or lack of it) in every anchorage.
• Jump from one photo-chart to the next by clicking on the edge in the direction you want to go.
• Check on swinging clearance in anchorages with our Swinging Radius Gauge.

We created this guide to make your cruising in New Caledonia safer and more fun.

Over the past 9 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 even better.

We did a preliminary cruising guide to New Caledonia on CD ROM in 2001 in association with the producer 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.

The biggest problems with the first guide - and the cruising book - were:

1. The book, and our digitized version of it, did not show you how to get into many anchorages, let alone navigate between them.
2. It was difficult to find the anchorage or information you were looking for.
3. The sketch maps often had little resemblance to the real world.
4. The GPS waypoints (usually of just the anchorage location with no points of approach) were taken from old 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.
5. There were very few photographs showing approaches to the anchorages.

We withdrew the preliminary CD-Rom version of the book as soon as we discovered these problems.

To see the difference between the Cruising Guide to New Caledonia book and our completely new Nautical Guide to New Caledonia click here.

Cruising the South Pacific for more than 35 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.

Years in Production, with complete background research.

We started production on the Cruising Guide to New Caledonia in 2002. Over several years we obtained high resolution satellite and aerial photographic coverage of every meter of New Caledonia's fabulous coastline, bays, creeks, and coral reefs. We modified these extensively to produce clear, highly accurate photo-charts that you won't find anywhere else.

We personally and thoroughly explored and surveyed the anchorages aboard our 44' cutter, Moira. On most of the anchorages we plotted the depths using a combination depth sounder and GPS that fed geo-referenced depth contours right into our computer. These surveys covered areas that nobody has surveyed before because most hydrographic surveys were done for commercial shipping, not for little boats like ours, and details that you'll need to know about in shallow anchorages were not properly surveyed, especially in out of the way areas that were of little commercial importance.

We analyzed the all the existing French, British and American pilot books and 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. 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.

We designed and programmed the Nautical Guide ourselves to be certain the guide would be easy to use - even if you barely spoke French or English. Our goal was to enable cruisers to find any information they looked for in two clicks.

From 2008 to 2010 we re-visited, re-surveyed and re-photographed 151 anchorages in New Caledonia and personally created 210 GPS routes to guide you around this fabulous south Pacific cruising area.

The result is unlike any other cruising guide in the world; it is quick, easy to use, and has such a wealth of information it is unlikely you would ever see it all.

A Companion Tourism 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 the cruising 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 tourism 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 distributed 40,000 copies a year of our tourism guides to travel professionals and travellers from around the world.

When you buy the Cruising Guide to New Caledonia you'll also receive the Tourism version as well - an encyclopedia of information about visiting every part of New Caledonia. Between the two guides you'll be able to plan your voyage to New Caledonia as if you had already spent several years cruising in New Caledonia.