The Tyranny of the Charts

I like charts, just as I have always liked maps... loaded with possibilities, covered with nooks and crannies and the promise of unexplored places. Sit me down with a magnifying glass and an old, musty roll-up of the Western seaboard and I am a happy camper.

This is all well and good if you are daydreaming or if you restrict your voyages to a relatively limited geographic area; up to this point, all our travels have been covered quite handily by two convenient waterproof Maptech chartbooks (1510 and 1520) which have all the relevant NOAA charts reproduced to a common size and bound together for Puget Sound and the San Juan islands.

If you are bound for Southeast Alaska from Seattle, however, you are suddenly looking at a whole mess of overlapping, inconvient, expensive options when it comes to paper charts.

"Wait," you say, "didn't I just read that you had purchased and installed a spanking new, GPS integrated chartplotter? Why not use that!" Indeed we did, and we shall; for about $250 we got two little chips the size of two postage stamps which cover every square inch (or centimeter, once you get north of 48 degrees) of our route. We expect to rely on that as our primary plot for the trip.

But it's not quite that easy, as nothing to do with a boat ever is. One, since it's a gadget, it's subject to failure--run out of power, short-circuit, get gremlins, you name it. If this happens while floating safely in dock at a major marina, well, it's time for cocktails and a warranty service call, and you can explore the sites for another couple of days. If it happens at night, in a westerly gale, off Cape Scott, well, you'll need something a little stiffer than the average cocktail, and a lot of luck to go along with it.

Beyond that, apparently it is a requirement of the Canadian Coast Guard that you maintain adequate paper charts for your prospective route onboard irrespective of any fancy electronic navigation gadgets you may be carrying. They're not the Mounties, but I'm disinclined to cross them nonetheless.

Cost, however, is a factor. I've heard it estimated that a full set of charts covering the Inside Passage and the west coast of Vancouver Island will run you north of $4000; just the Inside Passage set, at 2/3 scale and in black and white from Bellingham Chart Printers, is still a little over $1000. Now, after the initial investment in the chart plotter package, that seems a little steep for a (hopefully) redundant system. In fact, it's entirely outside our remaining--and quickly dwindling--budget.

What I find myself doing, then, is combing through the chart catalogs trying to find the right combination of discounted charts (a la the 2/3 size BCP versions), free self-printed charts (all NOAA charts are available for free, online--the downside to this is that only half the trip is in US waters and my printing capabilities don't do justice to the chart detail), and full-scale, full-fee charts (the only sort available from the Canadian Hydrograhic Service, who, conveniently, maintain a monopoly on surveys of Canadian waters) which cover the route in enough detail to be safe, but not so much that I am paying extra for a lot of stuff I'll never use. Those full chart sets are convenient, but include areas in great detail which we'll either bypass entirely or cover in the course of an afternoon without approaching any obstacles. Cutting out those large scale harbor charts for places we'll never be near makes things much more affordable; but it requires a lot of detective work.

I've been combing over online chart catalogs (I highly recommend the Dynamic Chart Viewers at American Nautical Services--they have the least cluttered and easiest to read catalogs for just about every chart source) trying the sort all this out for the past couple of weeks. I think I am just about there; the CHS is really my last major obstacle. Between their lock on charts for BC waters and the strong Canadian dollar, they are still breaking my budget.
It so happens that there are supposed to be a number of US Government charts covering those waters, but I have yet to find them freely available online as they should be... my tax dollars at work, and all. NIMA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, produces charts of "foreign" waters and the catalogs show a number of them I would like to get my hands on, but BCP wants to charge full price for them just like the CHS ones. NGIA, the parent agency for NIMA, is theoretically charged with distributing certain of its product to the public, but in practice they still embody the paranoid military mindset they were borne of, and it's extraordinarily difficult to find their product in understandable or useable formats.

Some guy named Bob, who is awesome, went through the existing (and publicly available--no military minds, these) NOAA electronic charts and converted them to PDF for easy redistribution. Be kind to Bob's bandwidth--he doesn't have a donate button up, yet, but those are large files! Take only what you need. I found the link off Sailnet so I don't think it's supposed to be secret, but Bob, if you don't want to ask for donations and don't want traffic from this blog, drop me a line and I'll take the link down.

If only Bob were to be frustrated by and turn his genius toward the NIMA charts!

At any rate, between Bob and some judicious paring, I think that I can get a safe complement of paper charts for the trip for around $200. Don't quote me on that.