SeaClear also has several nice features to help navigate your chart files. If a GPS sensor is connected, right-clicking and choosing Charts>On Position brings up a window listing all charts spanning the current position. Single-click on a chart and it displays instantly. Right-clicking and choosing Charts>Find Boat centers you on the largest scale chart where the GPS says you are. You can also right-click and choose Charts>Best Chart to automatically view the largest scale chart for your position. If you don't have a GPS hooked up, choose File>Chart>List All and pick a chart.

There are some deficiencies too. SeaClear's screen images didn't appear as smooth and sharp as some other applications. SeaClear also cannot rotate charts, as you might do to show a course-up display. For all manufacturers, this is a trade-off between display speed and the limitations of the raster format. Unlike vector charts, which are comprised of data, raster charts are large images that are sluggish and more difficult to rotate.

WAYPOINTS AND ROUTES

SeaClear is designed to be used with waypoint data. It has many features for creating and saving routes (sequences of waypoints) and tracks (a record of your course over the ground). You can save an unlimited number of waypoints and routes, constrained only by the storage capacity of your system.

Waypoint entry was very easy using the chart display and the mouse-click menu: simply right-click, choose Position>Add and enter a waypoint name to mark that location. Waypoint names can include spaces and upper- and lower-case to make them easy to read and remember. For example, we entered the long waypoint label of ¯Rickenbacker Moorings." Another nice feature is a comment field associated with each waypoint, letting you enter a lengthy personal note.

Tracks can be saved and plotted to create routes. You can join several shorter routes to create a longer route. It was easy to insert new waypoints into a route and to extend a route with additional waypoints. You can reverse a route with one click using ¯Reverse Route" in the dashboard menu. In addition, the dashboard displays your route statistics: start, end, and distance. If a GPS is connected, you can set a cross-track error alarm.SEACLEARSeaClear does not include a port wizard to help connect the GPS and other devices, requiring you to use the Device Manager in Windows XP. That made setup a little more difficult.

Waypoints, routes, and tracks can be imported and exported. You can transfer waypoint and route data from your PC to navigation units capable of receiving NMEA waypoint and route data. Your data can also be saved as a comma-delimited text file for export to other applications.

SeaClear also has some features reminiscent of the systems on commercial ships. For example, commercial vessels are required to keep an electronic log-essentially a "black box"-of their routes. Instead of only recording a track, SeaClear goes one step further and automatically keeps a log of date, time, position, heading and speed. It also has a Logbook feature for manual entries. These records can be opened, edited, and saved as a text file.

Our primary complaint about SeaClear's waypoint, track, and route features was not in its options, but the handling and organization of the data. We had quite a bit of trouble saving the waypoints in an organized way. In the end, it took several tries to understand the proper sequence of steps to save data-and this sequence was cumbersome and required a lot of screens and mouse-clicking for each data point. Even when we thought waypoints were correctly saved, we occasionally found some of our data either disappeared or was incorrectly stored in another regional waypoint folder when we restarted the application.

If you are a waypoint junkie (or cruising guide author), you ideally want multiple SeaClear position files, or collections of waypoints, within the SeaClear waypoint folder to organize your waypoint data. For example, you'd like a file for your Chesapeake Bay waypoints and a file for your Intracoastal Waterway waypoints. Unfortunately, the documentation is not much help here. After about 45 minutes of experimenting, we were able to create regional waypoint files to organize our thousands of waypoints.

But after all that effort there was a catch: once a waypoint is saved to a file, your ability to edit it is seriously constrained. Although you can edit the attributes of an individual waypoint, you cannot do any advanced editing, such as moving waypoints from one regional file to another. Any future changes require deleting and re-creating the waypoint.