Section
NOAA paper charts compared to electronic, the last commercial chart cartographer in Maine, the hand-bearing compass at sea.
Charts
The NOAA Coast Pilot is not a chart. It is a book, currently in 9 volumes, last fully revised between 2023 and 2025. For everything a chart cannot tell you, it is still the first thing to read.
Charts
A sounding of 6 feet on the chart does not mean 6 feet of water. It means 6 feet of water at a specific theoretical low. In the Bay of Fundy in June, that distinction is worth a keel.
Charts
Every chart smooths the coastline. A close look at three NOAA charts of the same Massachusetts shore, at scales of 1:80,000, 1:40,000, and 1:20,000, shows what each one chooses to leave out, and why.
Charts
A skipper sees a new buoy on his C-MAP plotter and assumes the chart company sent someone to look at it. The actual pipeline runs through USCG notices, Notices to Mariners, IHO S-100 feeds, and a small office in Genoa.
Charts
A 123-year-old chart, found in a deceased mariner's estate in Stornoway, became the starting point for a year of cross-checking what had changed in the Outer Hebridean shoreline since the survey of HMS Research in 1898.
Charts
Astrid Pereira's brother is an offshore yacht delivery skipper. Over four days off the south coast of Brittany in May, he taught a class of six how to use a hand-bearing compass as if the plotter had quit. None of it was new. All of it had been forgotten.
Charts
In a second-floor office above a hardware store in Camden, Hollis Burnham has been drawing inshore charts by hand and by Illustrator since 1991. He is, he believes, the last person in the state still doing it as a trade.
Charts
A four-month inshore test off Boothbay, with a paper folio on the chart table and a Raymarine plotter at the helm, found neither obsolete and neither sufficient on its own.