Navionics MSD/914P-2 Platinum North BC to Baranof Island

The Navionics MSD/914P-2 is a Platinum+ chart card covering North British Columbia up through Southeast Alaska to Baranof Island. If you're running the Inside Passage, working the waters around Sitka, or poking through the maze of channels between the mainland and the outer islands, this is the card that keeps your plotter honest. It loads the full Navionics marine and lakes chart content for the region, plus the advanced Platinum+ layers that make a big screen at the helm actually worth having up there.

What sets Platinum+ apart from a plain chart card is the extra layers. You get 3D View, so you can tilt the chart and read how the bottom falls away the way the water actually does. There's satellite overlay, which is a real help picking your way into an unfamiliar cove when the shoreline on a vector chart looks nothing like what's in front of the bow. And panoramic photos give you a heads-up on landmarks, harbor entrances, and marina approaches before you're committed. On a coast this remote, that kind of context matters.

Auto-routing is built in too. Punch in where you want to go and the card lays out a suggested course that respects charted depths and hazards. It's a genuine time-saver on long Inside Passage runs where you'd otherwise be hand-plotting waypoints for the better part of an hour. Just treat it as a starting point, not gospel. We'll get to why below.

Who's this for? Cruisers heading north for the season, charter skippers running Southeast Alaska, and serious anglers who want depth contours they can trust around Baranof and the Sitka Sound grounds. The card carries high-resolution bathymetry and depth shading, which is exactly what you want when you're hunting structure or threading a shallow entrance at half tide. Pair it with a CHIRP sounder and you've got real-time depth matching against the charted contours.

The chart content can be refreshed, too. Navionics releases updates through the year, and you pull them down through the Navionics app. So the card you buy today doesn't go stale the moment coverage gets revised. Get it current before a big trip and you're carrying the latest surveys and community edits for the region.

Install is simple. It ships as a microSD card with an SD adapter, so it drops straight into the card slot on most modern chartplotters and fishfinders. One thing we tell every customer: register the card with the Navionics app before you expect the Platinum+ layers to show up. Some plotters won't display the 3D and satellite content until that first registration is done, and it's easy to blame the hardware when it's really just an unregistered card. Do it at the dock on a good connection, not underway.

A word of honesty about coverage. The core cartography from Sitka down through Baranof is solid, but this is rugged, lightly charted country. A few of the rock and hazard notations near Baranof are dated, so auto-routing can occasionally steer around a perfectly good anchorage or skip one entirely. Some of the smaller logging-camp and float docks aren't on the card either. None of that is unusual for remote Alaska charting, and the fix is the same as it's always been up there. Keep a paper backup, drop your own waypoints on the spots you use, and trust your eyes in close quarters.

For the money, it's a lot of chart for a lot of water. If you're pointed north, get the card, register it at the dock, and spend your first evening poking around the 3D view of the anchorages you're planning to hit. You'll be glad you did.