Currently, marine charting is provided by the Geogarage platform, where you must create an account and subscribe to one or more services depending on your sailing areas.
An alternative complementary offer, C-Map Discover™X, will be available soon.
Description
The charts offered by Geogarage come from the digital data of numerous international hydrographic offices, such as SHOM, UKHO, NOAA, etc...
About thirty publishers are currently available, offering near-global coverage. These are raster, tiled charts that allow smooth display at different scales depending on the zoom level.
When you subscribe to a hydrographic service through Geogarage, you get access to all the charts published by that hydrographic office.
For example, if you subscribe to SHOM charts (Service Hydrographique et Océanographique de la Marine), you will have access to all SHOM charts.
Thus, if you're sailing across the Atlantic from La Rochelle to Fort-de-France, a single SHOM chart subscription is probably enough to cover your entire passage.
Here is an illustration showing the diversity of hydrographic services available in Geogarage:
- the harbour of Toulon by the SHOM (France);
- the Solent by the UKHO (United Kingdom);
- the Kiel region by the BSH (Germany);
- and finally San Francisco Bay by the NOAA (United States).
Accessing the subscription page
You must first create an account to access the catalog. Note: the credentials you use (email + password) will need to be entered in NavimetriX. Avoid special characters and spaces — a simple combination of digits and upper/lower-case letters is enough.
At this stage, a link already lets you access the areas covered by the catalog directly (red box).
Subscribing to a chart service
Once your account has been created and validated, the offers page is displayed:
Publishers are presented as thumbnails, grouped by major region: Europe, the Americas, Oceania and the Pacific. You can also check each one's coverage to confirm it includes the level of detail you need.
The "Subscribe" button guides you through the purchase process for your subscription.
Subscriptions are renewed annually, from one date to the same date the following year, with the sole exception of SHOM, for which Geogarage now offers a 3-month subscription aimed mainly at summer sailors.
Precautions regarding subscriptions
Subscriptions are automatically renewed by Geogarage, by tacit renewal, if:
- You have not indicated that you do not wish to renew,
- Your payment method is still valid.
Geogarage explains the process on their side:
If the subscription is not renewed by its expiry date, the charts — including those saved in the mobile device’s memory — are no longer available for viewing.
A few weeks before the subscription’s expiry date (day J), we send the subscriber a message informing them of the automatic tacit renewal (with a link to opt out if desired), as well as of the expiry of their payment method, if it is no longer valid.
However, the subscription is not cut off on day J itself: several follow-up reminders spaced a few days apart allow a user at sea who cannot check their messages to access this information, or to resolve payment issues with their bank.
However, if no action is taken on the subscriber’s account on our e-commerce site https://accounts.geogarage.com, the subscription is then cut off around day J+15.