Is someone already working on the trail that you have in mind?
Before beginning the work of gathering the data for a dinghy trail, please contact the site editors to make sure that you’re not creating a trail that someone else is also creating. By letting the Site Editors know that you are creating a trail, we will assign one person to work with you, help, and answer questions.
Please also join the Dinghy Trails FaceBook group if you are happy to do so.
Gather the information
- Gather your source material. That could be an existing dinghy trail extension, or it could be the information for a new dinghy trail.
- Decide what the name of your dinghy trail should be, and start a separate document in Word, Pages or an online sharable document.
- Paste the contents of the correct Information Schema into the empty page.
- Add the text content as suggested by the Information Schema.
How to create the map
- Go to OpenSeaMap. This should open a map that takes up the whole browser.
- Navigate to the location that you are planning to create a map of, and zoom so that the whole trail is in one map
- Have a list of the things that you want to write as accompanying text for the trail map, so that you can design the trail to match your writing. For the example below the words are
- 1. Start from Elmore Road Slipway
- 2. Aim directly for the Bramble Bank
- 3. Cross the shipping lane at 90 degrees only when it is clear to do so. Wait for the channel to clear of big ships.
- 4. Head parallel to the coast.
- 5. Keep to the deepwater side of Lepe Buoy and then aim for the beach at Lepe.
- 6. Note that it is a tremendously shelving beach and do not let your dinghy dry out or you may have to carry it 200m to get to the water on an ebb tide.
- View –> Turn off Coordinate Grid
- Tools –> Trip Planner and your page should look like the image below.
- Within this you can zoom in, and begin to draw your route as waypoints, as you can see where this trail is starting at a public slipway. The page can then be zoomed out and the track can be plotted. This is an activity which can be done only in one go.
Please play around with the route plotter – it is much easier to use than it first seems. Plot your track roughly first, so that the track runs from the start to the finish, and then double click to complete the track. Then all the points are moveable, and by clicking within a straight line another edit point appears, so that it’s possible to refine the track, including switching the aerial photo view on to get real precision.
- When you are happy that the route is correct, immediately download the GPX file, change “CSV” to “GPX” and click on “Download”
Change the name of the .gpx file to make the name relate to the trail.
- Now zoom out and take an image snapshot of the whole trail. Take your time with this as this is the “photograph” that will be published.
Now copy your image into PowerPoint or Keynote, and annotate the trail. Take a snapshot of that image, and making sure that it’s a .jpg file, and keep that separate.
The keynote template and the powerpoint template are below.
Note that Apple might attempt to be helpful and save the file as not a jpg but as proprietary Apple image format, which will upload and look lovely on a Mac but will be unreadable on a Windows machine. If this happens you can tell by opening the image in a separate tab and seeing the file suffix.
This is now a map that ties in with the words and is suitable for use as a dinghy trail map.
You should have the following as files:
- A document or documents with the completed information schema or schemas
- A .gpx file of the trail
- An image in .jpg format of the map of the trail
- A powerpoint or keynote file of your annotated image
These are ready to be sent to a Site Editor for making into a dinghy trail.
There will usually be some refining of the dinghy trail and we will do this with you. If you want help with this please contact the site editors so that we can work with you to get this knowledge gathered and formatted nicely.