GPS Navigating Rockfish Closures

It looks pretty certain that there are going to be a lot of areas closed to rockfishing this year but there will still be good sites open.  I think a GPS is going to become more of a necessity than just a real good idea.  Assuming closures, I'm wondering if it is possible to take the coordinates of a closed area and display it on a GPS chart so that you know where you are in relation to the closure without having to do math which is a challenge under the best of conditions.

Anybody have enough GPS savvy to know if this is possible?  How about recommendations for GPS's and charts.


Thanks,
Pete

well, point-in-polygon tests are easy enough for programmers but probably there has been no need for
something like this before, so I'm guessing there is no off-the-shelf solution.

One of the experiments my company Hooked Wireless, Inc., did was a simple GPS reciever/Bluetooth transciever
hooked up to a cell phone with a bluetooth transciever.
We displayed the GPS info on the phone, and a few other things but dropped the project. There's about one hundred
million companies (okay, slight hyperbole there) crawling all over the phone/GPS stuff so we didn't go further
with this one.

They'l probably get added into the commercial charts within a few years, just as other boundaries and points of interest are.

In the meantime the reserves will for the most part be bounded by recognizeable geography near the shore where we'd be kayaking.  It's possible some of them will be marked with bouys as well - they are in socal in areas that are popular for fishing, such as la jolla.  In fact, we should demand bouys - it'll raise the cost of the mpas.

I believe there is software to create custom maps for garmin GPSs.  A quick google search led me to the following

http://cgpsmapper.com/en/main.htm

It's not exactly point and click, but with a little work I think rockfish closure areas could be plotted.

As for which GPS units, I guess any of them that can handle plot uploads should work.



Brian

I already do a rough version of this. Basically, you only need to use two coordinates from the boundery area at one time. So you load the GPS points of the area in your GPS which you can bring up on the plot then you put in your location and see if it is over the line.

I've done this in the vicinity of Bodega Head Marine Center that has an area closed to fishing. Most boats think they have to stay way off of Mussel Point, there, but in fact you can hug the point if you have the coordinates.

This will also work for the current Salmon season that is limited to the state boundary which is 3 miles off shore. You load in your position and then some GPS units have a feature where you can trace a route , to shore in this case,  and it will tell you the distance.