Welcome to our drone mapping page for anchorages. This is a work in progress and will update rapidly. Check back!
On S/V Perspective, we use OpenCPN for navigation, anchorage exploration and assessing fishing opportunities. OpenCPN allows the use of commercial charts and “free” satellite images from google/bing etc. The resolution of the satellite images is great for navigation, however we found that in specific anchorages we wanted higher resolution. We find it extremely useful to have high resolution images to see bottom and shoreline texture both for anchoring and fishing and happen to have a drone onboard…
Before proceeding, ensure that you understand how to use these files. Charts and instructions are available on Bruce Balan’s Chart Locker.
All of these maps are MBTILES suitable for use with OPENCPN and are free to use as you see fit. The list of anchorages will continue to grow as we survey new anchorages with the right conditions and other cruisers submit images and maps. They are provided with no warranty or guarantee of accuracy.
If you are interested in contributing maps and/or drone imagery for processing, contact me. I am also happy to answer questions
Gulf of California Maps
| Anchorage | Location | Size | Date Updated | Notes |
| Playa Pichalingue | 24° 16.96′ N, 110° 19.83′ W | 1,247KB | 4/22/22 | Baja, outside La Paz Zoom 19 |
| San Telmo | 25° 19.75′ N, 110° 57.19′ W | 1,615KB | 5/3/22 | Baja between La Paz and Agua Verde Zoom 19 |
| Bahia Candaleros | 25° 43.39′ N, 111° 14.20′ W | 8,352KB | 5/19/22 | aka Ensenada Grande South of Loreto Zoom 20 |
| Monserrat | 25° 42.62′ N, 111° 03.00′ W | 11,554KB | 6/3/22 | East of Candaleros Clearly shows hazards Zoom 20 |
| Punta Colorada | 25° 51.36′ N, 111° 11.63′ W | 6,422KB | 11/30/21 | SE side of Isla Carmen Zoom 20 |
| Ramada | 26° 22.92′ N, 111° 25.87′ W | 6,404KB | 7/20/22 | N of San Juanico Zoom 20 |
| San Marcos N | 27° 14.56′ N, 112° 06.38′ W | 10,096KB | 7/29/22 | Sweet Pea and N San Marcos Zoom 20 |
| Isla Salsipuedes | 28° 43.60′ N, 112° 57.38′ W | 6,792KB | 8/9/22 | E of Animas Zoom 20 |
| Mitlan | 29° 04.14′ N, 113° 31.00′ W | 8,196KB | 8/25/22 | Updated. Anchorage between Isla Mitlan and Isla Smith/Coronado outside BLA Zoom 20 |
| Smith Mid | 29° 03′ 34.415″ N, 113° 30′ 42.142″ W | 4,564KB | 8/28/23 | Middle anchorage on Smith, below Mitlan Zoom 20 |
| La Mona | 28° 54.5’N, 113° 28.6’W | 12,172KB | 7/12/24 | South BLA Zoom 20 |
| San Marte | 25° 30.3’N, 111° 01’W | 4,364KB | 10/7/22 | Zoom 20 |
| Isla Islitas | 25° 45.2’N, 111° 16.6’W | 2,864 | 7/8/23 | South of PE Zoom 20 |
| Honeymoon | 25° 48.4’N, 111° 15.4’W | 5,732KB | 12/21/23 | On Isla Danzante. Zoom 20 |
| Punta Islotes | 28° 48′ 43″ N, 113° 21′ 15″ W | 7,132KB | 12/21/23 | E of Isla Animas Zoom 20 |
| Isla Animas | 28° 42′ 22″ N, 112° 55′ 59″ W | 1.944KB | 12/21/23 | Spectacular fair weather anchorage Zoom 20 |
| Agua Verde | 25° 30′ 56.48″ N, 111° 04′ 03.93″ W | 7,560KB | 12/31/23 | South of Loreto Zoom 20 |
| Painted Cliffs | 25° 59′ 48.12″ N, 111° 04′ 24.17″ W | 2,808KB | 2/2/24 | Back side of Carmen Zoom 20 |
| Bahia Salinas | 25° 59′ 40.51″ N, 111° 06′ 34.38″ W | 18,416GB | 2/26/24 | Bottom of Carmen Zoom 20 |
| Marquer | 25° 51′ 59.43″ N, 111° 13′ 14.46″ W | 8,144KB | 2/26/24 | West side of Carmen mid island. Zoom 20 |
| Catalina | 27° 51′ 47″ N, 110° 52′ 37″ W | 6,236KB | 12/1/24 | Outside Guaymas Zoom 20 |
| Montserrat S | 25° 39′ 13″ N, 111° 02′ 14″ W | 8,282KB | 12/8/24 | Southern Anchorages on Montserrat Zoom 20 |
| San Juanico | 26° 22′ 07″ N, 111° 25′ 48″ W | 9,056KB | 12/1/24 | aka San Basilio Zoom 20 |
| Get them ALL! | Gulf of California | ~130MB | Updated 12/8/24 | All files for the Gulf of California |
Mainland Pacific Mexico Maps
| Anchorage | Location | Size | Date | Notes |
| Isla Isabel | 21° 50.8’N, 105° 52.7 | 4,028KB | 12/21/23 | Monas UPDATED Zoom 20 |
| San Augustine-Chamela Bay | 19° 32’N, 105° 05 | 3,873 KB | 2/5/22 | Shallow, Surfing |
| Barra de Navidad | TBD | |||
| Carrizal | TBD | |||
| Get them ALL! | Updated 12/21/23 |
Drone Mapping HOWTO
I will outline the methods I have used to generate drone maps. My preferred method requires a fair amount of technical expertise with computers and operating systems and minimal to no commercial software. The second method I outline below requires less expertise, however quality maps require software licensing. Check out the included hyperlinks for all referenced software for description, instructions and any licensing requirements.
Here is an example of the google/bing satellite images vs. drone shot imagery. I do have the luxury to choose ideal conditions where the water is flat, but you can see it is still very dependent upon light and wind conditions. I can get much higher resolution, but the native files are 300-700MB which is not feasible for viewing.
There are multiple other ways to make maps with free, commercial and cloud based software so explore and have fun!
Requirements:
Drone: Almost anything will work that takes pictures. It depends more on what you expect. Make your choice based on what camera quality you need/desire and if you want to use advanced features such as truly autonomous flight plans. We use a DJI Air 2s. If I were to buy right now(8-2022) with what’s on the market, I would buy the DJI Mavic Pro 3.
Drone software: You will need something to operate the drone… While manufacturer provided flight software can be enough, I strongly recommend you look at something that will automate the mapping flights. Most of these are paid applications but they will save time and can increase quality. Note that automated flight on less expensive drones is accomplished by using a “virtual stick” and is still completely dependent on the controller. This makes advanced drones like the DJI Mavic Pro series more attractive. Here is an article that goes into detail. I normally use Dronelink for flying waypoint or a mapping pattern and DJI Fly or Litchi for manual surveys.
Flying the Drone: For 2D maps (aka orthophotos), you generally want to fly the drone in an overlapping pattern with 65+% overlap with the camera pointed straight down. The only time I vary gimbal pointing is if I am trying to limit glare/reflection off the water. I normally fly at 1000 ft as that gives me close to desired resolution for a zoom level 20 map with my camera’s resolution at 4k.
For 3D maps, you fly very differently and I suggest you look at the flight guides found on the OpenDroneMap website. Automated flying is easiest, but normally requires some internet connectivity or advanced planning; Dronelink will allow advanced map building and then offline flying.
You can also fly manual “patterns” with your drone to capture your map site. Depending on what software you use, you can take a single image and then process, or multiple images. The advantage of multiple images is that with something like Open Drone Map (ODM), it will stitch them together and georeference them for you. If you fly manual with multiple images, I have had best luck not rotating the drone at all. So, pick your target direction, fly forward, then right (or left), then backwards with the camera pointing down the whole time. This will create a grid. Take pictures every 2-7 seconds depending on height and coverage. Other than memory requirements in post processing, you can’t take too many images. Normally you want a minimum of 5.
Post Processing of images and building your MBTILE: (Work in Progress below)
There are two ways I build MBTILES, with the first method being almost exclusively used. There are many, many other options.
1: Open Drone Map/Web ODM
Open drone map is an open source initiative to generate 2d and 3d images from drone photographs. I won’t go into detail as they’ve already done that. Go to https://www.opendronemap.org/ and read all you can. I also bought the book, more to support the authors than for the information it provides for 2d map making.
Open Drone Map does require Docker for most installs, so if you are not at all technical, this can be a challenge. Once it’s setup, it is quite easy to use and maintain. If you don’t feel comfortable installing docker on the computer onboard, reach out to a friend. You’ll find a nerd in most anchorages… Docker will run on Windows, Mac and Linux. You will also need a reasonably powerful computer/laptop. I use a 9th gen core i7 laptop with 32mb of ram. Ram is more important than the CPU as a slow CPU will work, albeit slowly. I expect for most maps, 16GB is fine. I personally run Docker on a Linux VM running on my windows laptop. If you don’t have a reasonably quick computer onboard, you can use cloud processing with WEBODM (and others of course), but you’ll pay for that. It’s probably cheaper than buying a new machine just to make maps. Also, if you have bandwidth to upload your images, I’ll process them for you for free, at my convenience, presuming it is for OpenCPN charting.
The settings I use for 2d maps is (UPDATED)”crop: 0, dsm: true, min-num-features: 20000, sfm-algorithm: planar, skip-3dmodel: true” and I do not resize the photos. Removing webodm cropping may distort the edges of the maps, so use with caution. I manually crop with mapc2mapc and if you don’t want this you can remove the crop:0 in the configuration for webodm. If you fly at 1000′, you have resolution with a 4k drone that matches a zoom level of 20 in OpenCPN. If all works, you will have a massive geotiff(a georeferenced image) file–100’s of MB. You may also want to play with the “micmac” processing node. It does a better job of generating a geotiff with surfaces like water with no defined features. It tends to be iterative as it will fail with some images and you will have to manually remove them from the dataset.
Turning your Geotiff into an mbtile:
The best application that I’ve found to create an mbtile from WebODM is mapc2mapc. You can find the application here: https://www.the-thorns.org.uk/mapping/
The instructions are pretty good, and if you follow them you should be fine. I pay for the license, but you can also do most of what is required for free. When I make maps, I make only zoom level 20 maps which are good enough for me. At the time of this writing, OpenCPN supports up to zoom level 21 with the LATEST release. Zoom 21 gets pretty big though, and doesn’t offer much benefit IMO.
2. MapTiler
MapTiler will turn an image into a geotiff or mbtile. This is the easiest, though paid version that I’ve seen. There is a free version that will leave watermarks on your image, which is ok IMO for over water mapping. It can work with only 1 image, which is sometimes important. You need to be offline as it georeferences by having the user identify common points between an artifact on your picture with the same artifact on MapTiler’s satelite image. They have a bunch of options including cloud processing. I’ve used the desktop, now renamed engine. Realistically, you’ll need the paid version.
Check it out at https://www.maptiler.com/engine/download/
Here is an example:
Other notable conversion methods:
I briefly used Map Pilot Pro which does the flying/surveying and has the ability to process. I didn’t get it to work, but it was just as my drone was being supported. May be worth a look. https://www.mapsmadeeasy.com/map_pilot/
If you have any questions, or the above needs clarification, feedback is very welcome.