Another.... Why so expensive.... Item

Baggy

Baggy

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Iam thinking of purchasing my first Electronic Chart plotter :)

My god have you seen the price of the charts !!!! Luv a Duck :ambivalence:

I think I will stay with paper and my Yeoman
 
Completely waterproof iPad case - £90. Charts for all UK and Belgium, Holland and north France - £35. iPad version 3 can be bought for 2nd hand for £250.

£375 all in for cockpit or below decks plotter.

Dedicated chartplotters will be a disappearing breed.
 
vyv_cox said:
Too true. In the last week I have bought a Navionics Gold SD card for the whole of the Mediterranean and Black Sea for £200.
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Ah - when I made my comparison, I was thinking of the £80 I paid for a new Navionics Plus card covering the whole of Europe. Of course I forgot that that was an upgrade price, based on my possession of an ancient (early-2000s) card inherited with Ariam's plotter.

Still, totting up just my limited paper portfolio (South Coast from Chichester to Land's End, Channel Islands and adjacent French coast, the Bay de Seine, and two passage charts of the whole Channel) still comes to more than £200, and that's not allowing for the ones I've bought twice when the editions I had were cancelled.

Pete
 
The problem with paper charts is where to keep them. The previous owner of my boat left more than 160 of them, most of which are full size. The C-map cartridge that I have in my plotter gives me all of the Central Mediterranean. IIRC it cost me 246STG; well worth it in terms of convenience, IMHO.
 
PuffTheMagicDragon said:
The problem with paper charts is where to keep them. The previous owner of my boat left more than 160 of them, most of which are full size
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If you're not a liveaboard cruiser, then presumably you can keep most of them at home? You're hardly likely to find yourself unexpectedly needing to navigate the coast of Morocco and wishing you'd put the North Africa charts on board instead of the Baltic ones.

Ariam has the conventional lift-up chart table with a trough underneath, and that's deep enough for a 3" stack of charts - several times more than I will ever need on a part-time Channel cruiser.

Pete
 
prv said:
Ariam has the conventional lift-up chart table with a trough underneath, and that's deep enough for a 3" stack of charts - several times more than I will ever need on a part-time Channel cruiser.

Pete
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Follia Pura has a similar arrangement. Useful for keeping a small selection plus the usual plotting aids but not really practical for a stack of large charts. Even if they are sequentially numbered as per the intended use, extracting one from the pile is not so easy (at least on my boat). To be quite honest, I only keep paper charts on board in case of emergency. Note that, on passage, I do log the GPS position at hourly intervals.
 
vyv_cox said:
Too true. In the last week I have bought a Navionics Gold SD card for the whole of the Mediterranean and Black Sea for £200. I'm pretty sure I paid more for my set of folios for the Aegean Sea alone.
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+1 Did exactly the same last year. Previously, I bought the whole of the Caribbean and South America, a rather large area, for even less.
 
PuffTheMagicDragon said:
Follia Pura has a similar arrangement. Useful for keeping a small selection plus the usual plotting aids but not really practical for a stack of large charts. Even if they are sequentially numbered as per the intended use, extracting one from the pile is not so easy (at least on my boat). To be quite honest, I only keep paper charts on board in case of emergency. Note that, on passage, I do log the GPS position at hourly intervals.
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I do still use paper routinely, as a matter of personal preference. Most of my charts are in the form of A2 folios (both Imray and Admiralty), so what I generally do is keep most of them in their plastic wallets except for the area I'm currently in. That one is removed from its wallet and the charts kept on top of the stack. I also have the coverage diagrams (cut out of the original cover sheet of the folio) stuck to the inside of the lid so I can quickly identify which number I need. The charts are all numbered in the bottom-right corner (on the small number which didn't have it printed there, I have added it with a black pen) so it's easy to flip through the current portfolio for the necessary chart.

I don't have any full-sized Admiralty charts on board, but I know they have their little "thumb strip" printed on the back near what would be the front edge when stacked in a drawer, so I can't imagine they're that difficult to find.

Pete
 
prv said:
I don't have any full-sized Admiralty charts on board, but I know they have their little "thumb strip" printed on the back near what would be the front edge when stacked in a drawer, so I can't imagine they're that difficult to find.

Pete
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No, I'm not saying that they are "difficult to find". What I was trying to say is that after the chart has been located, it is quite awkward to extract out of the 'trough' due to the weight of the charts that are above it and the friction that it generates. Maybe it's just me.
 
PuffTheMagicDragon said:
No, I'm not saying that they are "difficult to find". What I was trying to say is that after the chart has been located, it is quite awkward to extract out of the 'trough' due to the weight of the charts that are above it and the friction that it generates. Maybe it's just me.
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Ah, I see. I know mine used to be a bit awkward originally as the stay for the lid was broken, so I had to use one hand to hold that up and extract the chart with the other. Now I've fixed it so the lid stays up on its own, extracting charts is easy. Probably helps that I keep the "current" area on top of the pile. Anyway, it's all a bit of a thread drift from the OP's complaint at the price of electronic charts :)

Pete
 
The sheer volume of data on electronic charts makes them good value. Just think of all the tidal data, facilities data, aerial photos, etc.
 
I was an electronic chart enthusiast until....we were struck by lightning!
I like to have some sort of paper chart as back-up.
 
Chart plotters are expensive when compared to something like a TomTom which retails at closer to £100 complete with all western Europe road maps. Problem is, chart plotters are small production runs in comparison and being branded "marine" automatically loads the price.
 
GrahamM376 said:
Chart plotters are expensive when compared to something like a TomTom which retails at closer to £100 complete with all western Europe road maps. Problem is, chart plotters are small production runs in comparison and being branded "marine" automatically loads the price.
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Maybe that's what this couple is using... :D

 
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