For any longer passage, I always use a paper chart to check my route. The reason for this is that obstacles do not disappear from a paper chart when you zoom out. I suspect part of the reason for Vesta's grounding during the Ocean Race was the navigator not being able to check the route on a paper chart. I don't know why this issue is not better addressed in electronic charts. I bought a couple of new Imray paper chart this year. Sorry to hear they are stopping.
Such an obstacle should not disappear when zoomed out, and in the official ENCs for the area the reefs are indeed visible when zoomed out. It is no different from having two paper charts of different scales, where a feature is on one but left off the other.
However they do.
I also use Memory Map with raster charts on my iPad alongside Navionics on my main ships plotters. As you say, raster are better for some things - eg pinnacle rocks rising out of deep water, very difficult to spot in Navionics, particularly on a sunny day.
Indeed, and it's hard to argue against that, but it's also something that can happen with paper.
I've never heard of Scale Minimum. Sounds like a useful thing. I don't see it anywhere in the menus of my plotter or in the Garmin doc. What system are you using? I suspect that the way Garmin charts are structured this wouldn't be possible.
I am looking at replacing my present nav system which is based on two Garmin GPSmap 4008s. This system has served me well and took me round the world but the plotters are now classed as legacy products and are becoming less and less usable.
Thanks for the advice. Good point about brightness and night sailing. I had thought about robustness and water proofing of tablets or screens but not that.
I'm mainly on various club boats so configurations vary. Raymarine setups are nice, but their wifi doesn't pass NMEA data so you'd need to add a separate wifi (or ethernet) gateway. B&G wifi does allow NMEA, so with that my mobile devices can consume the instrument data directly. I would suspect your existing wifi hub similarly provides this functionality.
Thanks for this reply. I could basically use my PC with OpenCPN as my navigation. It gets the position from the Vesper and displays AIS targets as well. I can also use it to display grib files and theoretically even do routing using the grib files (it doesn't work for small cruising boats in my limited experience). In fact it is already my backup nav system.
You may like this: map and 3d representation of one of their fortresses, made by the Republic of Venice, circa 1600AD. The blue spheres below are Murano glass bowls which were filled with burning pitch or black powder and thrown against the enemy during the battles, a few centuries before that Molotov guy
BUT …. And it is a big BUT ….. the few people who still use paper charts are generally still using the ones they bought 5, 10, 20 years ago. How much have you spent on new paper charts in the past 12 months?
I still have photographs from my childhood, my school years, university time aso. Obviously they were not left on the table on the verandah...
Magnetic tapes (remember them?) were routinely erased using strong magnetic fields (not so strong in these days of rare earth magnets), and the magnetic domains were reckoned to decay in 5-10 years storage unless actively refreshed. I had a filing cabinet drawer of old tapes that were almost certainly unreadable, but which a) we had no equipment that could read them and b) I kept them for potential archival interest.
It is of course cheap to state here but I do spend at least the value of 500 pounds per annum on charts, maps and similar items. I just like them - in paper.