On-Demand Paper Charts

Photographs by the author

Frugal Navigator's Small Craft version of NOAA charts comes folded to fit a waterproof chart case.

I still have the charts that my father and grandfather used when they were sailing out of Marblehead, Massachusetts. I don’t use them, of course—they’re over 50 years old and I live on the country’s other coast, 2,500 miles away. I’ve also kept my father’s charts of our local waters on Puget Sound, and every chart I used going up the Inside Passage.While my fondness for old charts may be somewhat sentimental, I still find paper charts useful even though there are some very sophisticated electronic alternatives. If I were traveling the Inside Passage or the Intracoastal Waterway again, electronic charts would have a clear advantage in lower cost and bulk, but my cruising grounds are limited in range, so I don’t need many charts to cover the area. The screen on my handheld GPS is less than half the size of a credit card, and while it can zoom in and out, it can’t give me the big picture and the details all at once in the way that a chart can. And on a sunny day I can rarely see through the glare on the screen.