Berkeley and Emeryville Marinas.

Layers of the map can be disabled but changes don't take effect until the next move or zoom. (Konstantin Gortinsky made me add this feature).

Please wait while I look up data for this map...

Ages ago trip to Baja I noticed that my GPS was in a 'tracking' mode that laid down a few waypoints every so often while it was on. This mode is supposed to be used to measure actual distance traveled but you have to leave it on all day for that to work. I suspect this is a conspiracy with the Energizer Bunny to sell more batteries. A fresh set of batteries only lasts 12 hours so I turn it on only occasionally. It occurred to me that even these occasional track-points could be uploaded and assembled into an accurate record of my trip. But how much memory does the GPS have before it has to start deleting the old points? I used it sparingly but then when I arrived home I discovered over 3000 track-points in the GPS going back almost a year into several previous trips! Now I turn the GPS on once an hour to let it lay down a few track-points for the map. Where I have data like this, I convert it into routes in my database. These are drawn as red lines on the maps. You can click on these lines now to get a link to the text describing that day! To switch over the map from using the kayaker icons to these new routes, I entered approximate track-points for many other long trips.

The yellow kayak icon appears wherever there is no route data and there is room to display one. These generally appear above and to the left of the actual location, so when you zoom in close enough they stay out of the way of the routes and images.


I spent hundreds of hours building a static tree of maps for this WEB site. In the early days there were no tools for building these and I coded the HTML by hand. As the site grew it become a chore to maintain the links between images, journal entries and maps. I was searching for an automated way to do this when I discovered the map API from Google. This allows me to build automated maps for any location on the planet. I kept the old static map tree for a long time but eventually abandon all that work when keeping it became a hassle.

All text and images Copyright © 2008 by Mike Higgins / contact