Charts and Waypoints
You have most likely
seen some of the charts that I have posted on this site. I use a tool called SeaClear II to bring up
the charts and plot various locations. It
gives you a great visual picture of the locations of the coral heads and
wrecks. I also find it pretty easy to
use. Best of all it is FREE! What I’ll do here is tell you how to get
SeaClear setup for
Note: You will
probably need WinZip or similar utility to extract the files in these “zip”
files.
To start, you must go
to the SeaClear site and download SeaClear II.
You can find that here. When I installed this on my system it went
to: c:\Program Files\SeaClear. Your
installation might be different. In any
case, I’ll refer to this folder as the SeaClear folder below.
Once you have
SeaClear installed, you can download the charts for
In the SeaClear
directory you find a program called MapCal_2.exe. You want to run that. You want to go to “tools->Autoload
List->Update”. This will add the new
charts to the list that you get in SeaClear.
Exit MapCal_2.
Next, you can
download the waypoints that I have for various dive site (generally the coral
heads) and wrecks here at Kwajalein. You
can download them here (3 K – Updated:
You’re now ready to
go! SeaClear has pretty good
documentation, but it is also pretty easy to use. Just a couple quick notes to get you going
and I’ll leave it up to you to learn all of the SeaClear features on your
own. First, to select different charts
you can look under “File->Chart->List All”. You’ll need to load the waypoints the first
time, but unless you clear them they will automatically be loaded each time you
start Seaclear. Simply open the desired
waypoint files by using “File->Positions->Open”.
The maps that I
provided are B&W, so the default waypoint (position) color will not show up
well on the charts. I’d recommend that
you go to “Tools->Properties->Other” and set the colors for “positions”.
That should pretty
much get you started. SeaClear is really
a great tool. Once you use it a bit
you’ll really begin to appreciate just how powerful it is!