This week's newsletter from ActiveCaptain (which will shortly be archived here) contains an interesting story about how NOAA has consulted the ActiveCaptain Interactive Cruising Guidebook database in its effort to gather information about problems with the "magenta line" that marks the channel on the U.S. East Coast's Intracoastal Waterway. Apparently it's been 70 years since the channel was carefully surveyed and the chart path line updated, and since then the channel has shifted among new shoals such that boaters following the line frequently go aground. What's cool about this is that ActiveCaptain is a boater-crowdsourced database of information, so this becomes an implicit validation by NOAA of the value of information originating in individual boaters. While NOAA says it would take into 2015 to make this massive fix, boaters on the ICW can gain immediately from the ActiveCaptain Guidebook's information about shoal areas - just as cruisers everywhere can learn more about anchorages, marinas, hazards, and more. If you cruise into new waters but don't know about the ActiveCaptain Interactive Cruising Guidebook, you really need to learn more about its advantages.
