PassagePlus is a passage planning, navigation and ship tracking application aimed at the leisure sailing market. To the best of our knowledge it is the only Mac OS X application compatible with the UK Hydrographic Office's ARCS charts, Land Information New Zealand's NZMariner charts and the Australian Hydrographic Service's Seafarer RNC charts.

PassagePlus targets the leisure boating market—sail or power—and is intended for the day/weekend coastal sailor. Our goal was to give it an uncluttered interface usable on a small laptop like a MacBook and to restrict the feature set to those things that might be used frequently by this kind of user. Its extensive AIS tracking capabilities will also appeal to ship-spotting enthusiasts, whether or not they have their own boat.

PassagePlus is a Universal binary that runs on Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above on PowerPC Macs and Mac OS X 10.4.4 and above on Intel Macs. You can download it from this site and try it out free of charge using the five demo ARCS charts and four demo Seafarer RNC charts. A full licence costs US$70 (plus VAT where applicable) and the serial number will unlock the ability to open any ARCS or Seafarer RNC charts you buy from your retailer and the entire collection of NZMariner charts.

Why we developed PassagePlus

We were investigating charting/navigation applications for the leisure boating market. Specifically we were looking for applications compatible with the UK Hydrographic Office's 'Admiralty Raster Chart Service' (ARCS) charts

—a series of over 3,000 electronic raster charts, covering the whole world. See Admiralty Leisure for more details.

Despite the understandable rise in popularity of vector charts, ARCS raster charts remain popular, primarily because of their instant familiarity to those accustomed to using Admiralty paper charts. So it seemed a pity that, as far as we could tell, there was no ARCS-compatible application available for Mac OS X. We decided to write one, and the UKHO granted us a licence to do so. PassagePlus is the result.

Subsequently we added the ability to use NZMariner and Seafarer RNC charts. See the charts page for more details. The AIS capabilities were initially provided as a safety measure when sailing, but we found that many users were using PassagePlus as a shore-based ship spotting application, so we added the  AIS Library, which gives them more information and lets them keep a record of their sightings.