Electronic Charts for South East Asia
Charts for Southeast Asia are often really wrong. This includes the Navionics, C-Map and Jeppesen electronic charts. The official Indonesia government charts are pretty good, but expensive. They can be purchased in electronic S63 format and used in the newest versions of OpenCPN.
Supplements to modern electronic charts from Navionics or Jeppensen
An alternative and/or supplement is to use “charts” made with the superb images from Google Earth. This has been made very easy by Paul Higgins (see http://www.gdayii.ca/). We have taken advantage to access to good internet and made charts for all of Indonesia and Micronesia. There has been no quality control and Google Earth’s images are not foolproof. In particular, small landmasses may be missing, so do not use for navigation. On the other hand, their GPS coordinates seem to be spot on. Use these kap charts to look for potential anchorages, get an idea how much correction to use in you plotter, and just get a visual feel for the area you may cruise.
Google Earth kap files for Indonesia made in May 2014:
All the Indonesia and Micronesia kap files and the gpx route files used to make them are available: Click here to open in a new window for download.
The above folder has 7 folders with kap files and one folder with the routes. You can download the GPX “routes” used to make these and load in OpenCPN to see which folder you need if you do not wish to download all the folders. We suggest that in OpenCPN you add only one of the folders to be opened at any one time. The kap files are large and too many of them can crash a PC.
EastNorthEastIndonesia
NorthEastIndonesia
NorthEastNewGuinea
NorthMidIndonesia
SouthEastIndonesia
SouthMidIndonesia
Palau,Truk,Yap,Micronesia
RoutesTracks: GPX files used to feed GE2KAP software for making these charts. See Paul’s website for more info on GE2KAP and to download the software to use.
More Google Earth kap files for Indonesia - Very High Resolution 2015
Jon Hacking on SV Ocelot has made very high resolution GE kap files for much of eastern Indonesia. These files are very large and he has removed the "ocean" blue area. To get these contact Jon at www.hackingfamily.com