Around the Great Lakes

Maps, Maps, Maps

Decisions. Decisions. Decisions. Planning for a trip of this magnitude is making a number of small decisions that add up to launch day, and these decisions are tough. Decisions that I make today will effect my trip four months into it, and if on the trip I change my mind, it becomes exponentially harder to carry out the new decision. The hardest decision to date has been selecting maps, (Electronics and camera equipment is a close second.) because a)maps are expensive and b)maps help you know where you’re at and c)USGS topo maps suck.

At one point, I thought that I’d use USGS 1:250,000 scale topo maps for the US side and NRC 1:250,000 scale topo maps for the Canadian side. My thought was that after I make a right hand turn from the Grand Marais harbor, I’ll just have to keep land on my righthand side and as long as I keep that up, I’ll finish just fine. Plus, I’ve used 1:250,000 scale maps in Canada for kayaking trips successfully and love the overview the scale gives me, so these are being used on the Canadian shore. Then I looked at the USGS topo maps. They’re abysmal and worthless for the kind of detail — shown on Canadian topos — that I’ll need for navigation. That didn’t stop me from spending about 10 hours learning how to download free seamless USGS maps. The 1:100,000 scale USGS topo maps would work, but they were so out of date to be almost worthless.

After abandoning the idea of USGS topo maps, I considered Richardsons’ Chartbooks. When my friends Dave and Amy from Wilderness Classrooms circumnavigated Lake Superior, they used an old chartbook they borrowed from John at Superior Coastal Sports. These chartbooks are wonderful, but heavy, and they contain much more than I really need to know.

I haven’t used many charts in my life, because I typically default to topo maps. I can look at a topo map and know exactly what the terrian is going to look like. I’ve spent 100s of hours looking at topos on trips and when planning for trips, so making the leap away from topo maps took a big step and is probably the reason I spent 10 hours learning how to download free seamless USGS maps. After I looked at the Great Lake’s 1:100,000 scale marine charts, I realized that they’re just as good as the 1:250,000 Canadian topo maps (too bad there are no 1:250,000 NOAA charts). But these things are expensive and most of the charts have just a sliver of land on them and a bunch of water. Seemed like a waste of paper to me.

I don’t like to carry extra paper with me, but sometimes your confined to maps and the extra weight of that paper because of the nature of the beast. I used McKenzie maps on my canoe trip on the Voyager Route, and they weighed a ton. After looking at the 100s of dollars I’d need to spend to get charts I almost abandoned the idea until I discovered the NOAA’s Raster Navigational Chart server. The server provides marine charts for US waters for free.

Free in NOAA’s case has a snag. The snag is that NOAA’s charts are provided in BSB or .kap format. This is a proprietary format owned by a private company and is pretty useless unless you buy software that has the ability to read the .kap file format. So much for our government doing something for the people.

Resigned to paying money for a program that probably wouldn’t be able to print of scale maps to the size I wanted, I abandoned the idea of free NOAA maps until by chance I ran across an old MS-DOS command line program that takes the BSB .kap format and turns it into something that I can use. I downloaded the charts and spent hours typing at a command prompt: bsb2png.exe xxxxx_1.kap xxxxx_1.png Because it uses the command line, I had to type bsb2png.exe xxxxx_1.kap xxxxx_1.png for every map, and within each map, each harbor has its own file, which I had to type bsb2png.exe xxxxx_1.kap xxxxx_1.png to convert. It took me days of free time and many cups of coffee to convert all the charts for the Great Lakes.

All that typing was worthwhile after I saw the resulting .png files. Sample to the right. The detail is great. I imported the .png files into an image manipulation program, played with dpi to get the scale correct, and then cropped the page to 11″x17″ and printed away.

All of the American side of Lake Superior fit on 12 two-sided 11″x17″ pieces of paper, including a 1:60,000 scale map on the Portage Ship Canal in Houghton. The Canadian side of Lake Superior fit on 4 two-sided 11″x17″ pieces of paper.

This did sacrifice the Lat/Long on the side of some charts, and because I’m using charts, my UTM grids are gone, but the maps look great, have very little wasted paper, are light, and saved me a couple hundred dollars.

Now if I could find someone to sponsor me with a Garmin Oregon 400c GPS Unit with BlueChart g2 Coastal Charts, I’d be perfectly set in the navigation department and be set with using Trip Tracker. I am, of course, willing to trade prints from the trip for this unit. I’d trade a 16×20″ print with foam board backing or a 20″x30″ print with foam board backing.

Tags: bsb2png, bsb2tif, Canadian tops, convert marine chart, Great Lakes, maps, marine charts, NOAA, USGS topo