A few years ago I wrote a series of articles about planning multi-day cruises. I finished off the series with an example. See Planning Multi-Day Cruises—Example. Since that time, I created a user-friendly GPX tool. So now I revisit that example.
The example walks through finding anchorages, planning a route between them, refining the route, cleaning up the route, documenting the route, and adding it to a chartplotter. What has changed is the GPX Tools that I use to clean up the route and document the route in a spreadsheet. I now have more user-friendly GPX tools.
There are two ways you can continue reading this post. You can go to the original post here and follow it to the heading Cleaning the Route, skipping the section on GPX Tools, or, you can download the route that was created by clicking here.
This route, named WP-OWW, was created and refined using OpenCPN and HomePort. This post continues after the section titled Exporting a Route from HomePort.
Cleaning the Route
I open the GPX Tool. I have it installed as a shortcut on my desktop. Alternately, I can point my browser to questeria.info/gpx/.
I click Chose File, and choose the file named WP-OWW.gpx. Then, I upload it to see the contents of the route.
I scroll down to the last entry, and see there are 11 waypoints in the route. The names are random, except for the starting and ending anchorages. There are two waypoints in the file that correspond to the two anchorages. I can download a CSV file now, but I want to clean the route before that. First, I set some options.
Setting Options
I click Show Options and the Options panel appears. The first set of options are formatting choices for the CSV file. I set Lat/Lon format to dd mm.mmm and Distance to Naut. Miles. Depth and Time Set are options for tracks, so I leave them alone.
The last set of options are for route cleaning. I check Reorder, Clean Sym, Hide Name and Clean All. I set Num Digits to 3 and Symbol to Waypoint. These are the default options that I used last time.
I click Hide Options to save the values and continue. I set Start Num to 400. This is because my previous routes start at 0, 100, 200 and 300.
Clean Route
I click Clean Route to clean the route.
The message says 11 waypoints out of 11 cleaned and Start Num is updated to 411.
I scroll through the route and it looks like the cleaned route from the original example, but I want to redo it using a different option.
Clean All Unchecked
I click Clear to restart the whole process. Then I click Show Options and uncheck Clean All. This tells the GPX Tool to ignore the two anchorage waypoints. I click Chose File, select WP-OWW.gpx, and click Upload GPX as before. I reset Start Num to 400. Next, when I click Clean Route, the message says 9 waypoints out of 11 cleaned, and everything is reordered and cleaned except for the two anchorage waypoints.
Downloading the Files
Next, I click Download CSV and it downloads a file named WP-OWW_cln.csv to my Download folder and disables the Download CSV button.
Then, I click Download GPX and it downloads a file named WP-OWW_cln.gpx to my Download folder and disables the Download GPX button.
Importing Cleaned Route
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Importing to OpenCPN
I import the cleaned route back into OpenCPN. I delete the old uncleaned route to avoid confusion. I right-click on it and select Delete… I get a message “Are you sure you want to delete this route?”. I click Yes. Then, I open the Route & Mark Manager and go to the Routes tab. I click Import GPX…, and select file WP-OWW_cln.gpx in my Download folder. I get a message that 2 duplicate waypoints were detected and ignored. I now have a route named WP-OWW. I open the route’s properties and notice that some of the original information has been lost or changed. This is caused by importing it after it was exported from HomePort.
I restore it to its original state. I put West Pass in the Depart From field and Okeechobee Waterway in the Destination field. I change Color from Magenta to Default color and click OK.
There are still some differences. The waypoint symbol is now Combo! and appears as circle with a dot. Also, the Show name box is checked for each waypoint. I can manually change each waypoint property, but I can do them all at once with the GPX Tool.
Recleaning the Route
I export the route from the Route & Mark Manager by selecting WP-OWW and clicking Export selected… and save it to a folder. Then, I open the GPX tool and upload the file I just exported.
I click Show Options and uncheck Reorder, and check Clean Sym, Hide Name and Clean All. I also set Symbol to diamond.
I click Hide Options and Clean Route, and Download GPX. Then, in OpenCPN, I delete the old route and import the re-cleaned route as before. It all looks good.
Importing to HomePort
I import the cleaned route back into HomePort. I delete the old route to avoid renaming due to duplicate names. I open HomePort and click on my Route2019 list. Then, I right-click on route WP-OWW and select Delete. I get a message saying “Items will be deleted from ALL lists.”, I click Delete.
To import the cleaned route, I click File and select Import into Route2019… I select file WP-OWW_cln.gpx and click Open. Surprisingly, it doesn’t make a difference if I use the original cleaned file or the one I recleaned for OpenCPN. This is because HomePort ignores Show name and waypoint symbol diamond. It knows about the starting and ending anchor waypoints because I already imported them into Route2019. I select WP-OWW_cln.gpx. It looks good.
To send this route to the SD card, I right-click on route WP-OWW and select Send To… I click on USERDATA, and then OK.
I can now put the route on my chartplotter, see Saving Routes and Waypoints to Chartplotter. I can also copy it to my ActiveCaptain App, see Copying Route to ActiveCaptain App.
Organizing Routes in a Spreadsheet
You can now go back to the original post heading, Organizing Routes in a Spreadsheet, but I do it a little differently below.
When I have all the routes for my trip, I like to organize them in a spreadsheet. You can use Excel or Google Sheets. I use both. The first step is to get a template. I have a shared template on Google Sheets here. Start by copying it to your own spreadsheet. I’ll name mine Example RouteSheet. The spreadsheet has a template sheet, named RteFormat. The template has six rows of header. The first step is to customize your template. Change speed of 5.5 in cell D3 to your planned average speed, in knots. Then, change your Start, cell C4, to your planned departure date and time, for example “11/21/2021 8:30”. This field can later be modified for each route.
I keep RteFormat sheet as is, and duplicate it to create a sheet for each route in my trip. To start, I click on the RteFormat sheet and select Duplicate. Then I click on Copy of RteFormat and select Rename... I give the sheet the same name as my route, WP-OWW.
I go to my Download folder and open WP-OWW_cln.csv with Excel and I see this.
Next, I copy the route information into my sheet. I copy all the cells in columns A through F, starting with row 9, by dragging my mouse from corner-to-corner to highlight the data, right-clicking and selecting Copy. Then I go to WP-OWW sheet, right-click on cell A7, and select Paste. Finally, I type the route name, WP-OWW, in cell B1, the starting point, West Pass, in cell B2, and the destination, Okeechobee Waterway, in cell F2. I update the speed, in knots, in cell D3, and the start time, in cell C4, if needed. The other fields in the header are computed by the spreadsheet; Total distance of 60.04 nautical miles, in cell B3. Total time of 10 hours, 55 minutes and 1 second, in cell F3. End time and date of 11/21/2021 19:25:01, in cell F4.
I’ve shared my completed route spreadsheet here.
I’d love to hear what you think about the GPX Tool. Leave a comment to this post if you have any suggestions. I am planning to write more posts about the GPX Tool. You can subscribe below to receive an email notice when new post are available.
I do all this with my own time and money. If you find anything useful, please go to questeria.info/donate.html, and donate something to my website. Thanks!
