More on Garmin ...

the company I love to hate!

I'm racing in early May in the Women's Regatta, formerly known as the Bikini Cup, a race for women sailors. I'm the navigator for this trip.

At the helm is a woman who would like her navigator to have a chart plotter available, but we're not racing on my boat but on someone else's. Although his boat is very well equipped in many ways, his chart plotter is an old Garmin 76CX.

It's difficult to use as you might a modern chart plotter, tracking your course from waypoint to waypoint. I had one of these until it stopped working, so I was fairly familiar with it, but because of its tiny screen I never used it for anything except getting a precise latitude and longitude, which served me very well once.

I thought, "No problem. I'll just get a manual online." I found a Garmin website that had this old manual, but it wasn't a PDF, and when I downloaded it to my Macintosh, it was just unreadable gabble.

Garmin has done it again in not supporting Macintosh (in fairness, I can't expect them to support an old 76CX, but ...) They could have just put the manual into a PDF file and then anyone would be able to read it. The solution is so easy it's laughable, but clearly they just didn't bother.

We don't really need a chart plotter for this small race course, so I'm not worried about it. We can sight all the markers. But really, Garmin -- PDF? It's ... not hard.