Best source for canal planning?

[Doug B]

Hi all.  New to this forum.  We’re from Arizona, USA, and no, we don’t like like the insane Trump crime family either.  We retired a few years ago, bought a trawler, and cruised about 10,000 nautical miles around eastern North America.  (douganddanaandaboat.com).  We hope our next adventure—post COVID—will be exploring your awesome canal system.  I’m looking for a route planning tool to lay out the best way to cover the waterways without too much backtracking or duplication.  I’m still investigating visa options so I’m not sure how long we’ll have to liveaboard and cruise continuously.  Thanks in advance.

 

[dmr]

CanalPlan is a web tool that is very good at the details of a journey, you can customise it with your own speeds and it then makes very good predictions of journey times (except when things go wrong). For paper planning the Nicholson books are very good, but really you need a nice big paper map of the whole system that you can lay out on a table, both Nicholson and Imray? publish these.

 

Don't worry too much about exploring the whole system without repetition, doing your favourite bits again and again in different seasons can be good, and aimless rambling and spontaneous decisions are part of the fun. Its a way of life, not a mission.

 

................Dave

[Doug B]

Awesome!  Exactly the info I hoped to get.  Thanks.

[ditchcrawler]

11 hours ago, Doug B said:

Awesome!  Exactly the info I hoped to get.  Thanks.

It looks completely different coming from the opposite direction and you get a chance to visit things you missed on the way out. Even the waterway is different as you are going up as apposed to down, or the other way round