The Interactive Map Index

This map is slowly getting more and more out of date. For example, as of this writing (April 2008) I have paddled all of Washington, half of Oregon (the other half scheduled for July), and several exotic locations around the world. I generate maps for these new locations automatically with the Google map API. It will direct you to one of these old maps if necessary, and I'm replacing them one at a time with Google maps anyway.

Click on the colored areas to get more detailed maps.

Clicking on areas of this map should lead you to more and more detailed maps until you can see kayak trails as red lines on the ocean. Clicking on these will bring up a kayak journal entry about each location along the coast.

I have been over some areas many times, with journal entries for each trip. In these places I have put in a pointer to my favorite story about the location, or the most recent journal entry. Usually the stories have links back to previous trips in the same location, so you can find out more about a spot if you are interested.

A few of the maps came from the Xerox PARC Map Viewer. I stole several of the mid level maps from other sites. Many of the older detailed maps (with a scale of 1:50,000) all came from the Tiger Mapping Service put on the WEB by the US Census Bureau. The Census Bureau has combined data from many different places to build these maps. The database of county borders is digitized at a much lower resolution than the shoreline. This results in maps that have sections of land painted ocean colors when the shoreline sticks out past the county "line" and sections of ocean painted county colors. I had to run along the shoreline in each map and correct these defects. Even the detail of the shoreline changes from place to place. For some reason the remote Mendocino Headlands is rendered in incredible detail while the cosmopolitan Angel Island is rendered as a mere dozen straight lines. As I corrected the shoreline problems I added more details from the USGS 7-1/2 degree topographic maps. This allowed me to put in all the major offshore rocks, and a smattering of pixels for fields of smaller rocks. I added labels for all the bays, coves, and points along the shore. And, of course, I added lines in the water indicating approximate paths of me and my kayak.

After all this work, I now consider the resulting bitmap-maps my own, although I am grateful for the Census Bureau for supplying the original data.

The newer detailed maps were cut from the Topo! program by Wildflower Productions.