Click to download Ed Wallner's excellent if somewhat prehistoric DOS-based tide and current program. Included are supplementary data for the British Columbia coast that was compiled by Paul Getman of Coal Harbour, BC from data constants published by the Canadian Hydrograhpic Service. Though primitive graphing capabilities are included in Tides, try printing the data to file then loading it into a spreadsheet graphing module to create an easy to read chart, as below, for kayaking, fishing or just hanging around the salt chuck. Practical use in the field has shown Tides to be extremely accurate with more tidal stations than found in government-published tidal charts. Download: 219 KB

Recreation Map of the Powell River area including the Sunshine Coast Trail, the Powell Forest Canoe Route and Desolation Sound.

This, freeware, or rather careware Java-based tide and current prediction program is available at the website of Washington state math and sailing nut Paul Lutus. JTides looks good and appears to work well though I have yet to put my life on the line with it. Because it is careware, you have to be nice to people if you want to use it. Of particular interest to west coasters, a huge database of data sets for the BC coast is included. For me at least, exporting data to MS Excel seems to produce a more usable tide graph. Click the link above to reach the author's website. The archive is a svelt 1.4 MB, minuscule by Windows standards.

Astronomy Lab 2, a creation of Personal MicroCosms and Pocket-Sized Software. Click the link for a downloadable demo of this excellent shareware program. Before heading into the British Columbia outback use Astronomy Lab 2 to check to determine whether there will be any significant meteorite displays. Of course viewing will be dependent on the weather as well as the phase of the moon. Because of the latitude, in British Columbia summer, nights are much brighter than those in the winter and therefore are not as good for viewing astronomical phenomena. In addition to meteorite showers, check also for solar and lunar eclipses. On any reasonably dark, clear night look for orbiting space junk as well. Data compiled for Vancouver should be sufficiently accurate for just about anywhere in the province.

This collection of 34 illustrations from BC Car-Free has been compiled in a downloadable screen saver. Just click the link to start downloading the self-extracting archive. Size: Just over 19 MB. Optimized for large screens.