I have the Cap'n aboard - and am still trying to get to know enough to
be dangerous.

With our recent decision to go up the East coast before setting out on
our Caribbean odyssey, we set about acquiring the appropriate charts,
including replacing the umpteen we'd given away as not needed when we
first decided to do the Caribbean and not come back any further north
than St. Thomas once we got that far :{/)

A visit to the Seven Seas Cruising Association offices when I had to
be in Ft. Lauderdale last week provided nearly 60 paper charts and
kits. A visit to the NOAA website provided 153 electronic raster
charts.

The NOAA charts come in what appears to be a couple of formats -
a .bsb which seems to be an index of the parts for a chart, and others
(.kap) which have from one to many parts.

When I did the download for FL and the other areas which we thought we
needed (many months ago), I *thought* I had succeeded in making them
part of the Captain's inventory. However, attempting to see these
(electronic) charts I'd just gotten duplicated on paper on the Captain
failed. Apparently, I've stored them in a place which the Captain
doesn't like (even though I updated the path), or he can't read them,
or they've got some association attached to them which is improper.

Can anyone tell me a couple of things? They a

What is the name of the program (something.exe, I presume) which opens
either the bsb or the other, .kap?

If the file in question has something inappropriate (previous attempts
to open the download yielded the usual windoze "do you want to search
the web for something to read this file??" message), how do I make
the association disappear in the "view/options" section of my folder?
I've currently got the Captain Voyager Mosaic as the selected opener.
Double clicking any such file opens the Cap'n to the last chart I'd
had, and not the one I'd clicked - and searching for a specific chart
in his list doesn't have that one (or any of the others I'd
downloaded). Attempts to delete the .bsb have failed as the "delete"
button is grayed out in the "view/options" section...

Or, anything else which comes to mind if you've succeeded in
downloading NOAA charts.

And, on an entirely different tack, ENC charts are also available from
NOAA on free download. They seem from reading the info, to be
somewhat more robust, or perhaps more feature-rich, or some other
reason to have them as well. Are ENC charts readable by the Cap'n?
In my inventory ("get chart" in the "file" tab), there appear to be
some of that type from the CDs I got when I bought the areas I was
going to cruise, initially. If ENC charts are both readable, and
worth having, how do I organize those in order to make that happen?

Thanks.

L8R

Skip

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