What to do With Chart Storage?

Re: ??? Polar Flights ....

This was slightly later. Also the polar route for going to Japan did involve quite a lot of non polar travel. Surprisingly. Correcting the position on the way down the other side might have been of interest to the pilots in the event of some failures. How I got to know about it was due to a 747 dumping all their fuel over were I lived when they had to turn back to get one of them mended. Of course I never listened to them or had a relative that flew that route so how would I know.
 
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I'm a dinosaur - going to sea without paper charts would be unthinkable.

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Any chance of our own Forum then? LARGE fonts of course . . .

Oh dear, I see no-one has tried to explain how a square metre of detailed info can be compacted onto a a 6" screen. And here's me willing to learn . . .

Aren't we forgetting that most useful aid to navigation: the crew who've been there before? I have to admit that a cry of "I've stayed in that hotel!" is not the most gratifying conclusion to hours of uncertain navigation - but it can be very welcome! (Mounts Bay, Easter 1968).
 
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Oh dear, I see no-one has tried to explain how a square metre of detailed info can be compacted onto a a 6" screen. And here's me willing to learn . . .


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Which is not to say that some charts don't have the reverse problem - nine tenths of a square metre of featureless sea >20 metres deep, with a tiny scrap of Irish coast in the West, a tiny scrap of the Mull of Galloway in the North and a slice of Isle of Man in the South East. It hurts me to cough up the 18 odd quid for that, but I wouldn't be without it.
 
Thanks for the responses. Was definitely not a troll but I did suspect that some would think so.

I think I will do as some have suggested and partition the space up (probably using plastic boxes) to store mainly small items and things such as hand bearing compass, etc. Unfortunately I don't think it is quite deep enuff to store beer cans upright in /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif.

I am not sure why some think I should keep charts which are not being used in prime storage space (and by the way I did not say I was taking them off the boat but they will disappear into some remote space - dare I suggest it but there is one such space snugged in beside the holding tank). But as far as I am concerned they are pretty much extinct.

For those worried about safety I can advise that we do carry a sextant, Sight Reduction Tables Vols 1 to 4 (0 to 60 degrees, but I can manage spherical trig without them), a perpetual almanac (the one that used to be in old editions of Bowditch) as well as two electronic ones, and in the end I figure I could make a good stab at where I was just from sun and the equation of time (assuming the ELECTRONIC clocks and watches were still all working /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif).

Regarding noting position on a paper chart every hour, I have not done this for many years (since going electronic) but if I don't have a visual reference as to where I am then I will note position and velocity on a pad at a frequency depending on how far I am from any dangers shown by the ECS plot ie if dangers 3 hours sailing away I might note position every 2 hours, just in case. If big tidal influences, etc which would make recovery to a manual plot more difficult then again increase the frequency - I don't live by any mandated 1 hour or whatever rule that may or may not be sufficient or may be a vast overkill.

I always use official electronic charts (and for thousands of miles around here the official charts are still all raster so carry exactly the same information as the paper ones) and on a 15 inch or bigger screen.

In 10 years we have never had a loss of power on this boat (lost one alternator once) and never a PC or GPS failure (nor ever a loss of position).

Which, together with other talks of disaster around the forum, perhaps introduces a story regarding our main GPS - it was listed by the "disaster planners" as destined to fail on both of the 1999 GPS week rollover and on the 2000 new century rollover (how it could do the latter after doing the former always troubled me /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif) and, furthermore was also on these lists as destined to fail again on some given date in 2005 for some undefined reason.

I emailed the manufacturer and they said the claims were incorrect which has indeed proven to be so - has never missed a beat.

Again, thanks for the responses.

John
 
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As for using a PC for charting! These are built from parts never intended for yachts and mostly have fans.

[/ QUOTE ]I am a great fan of Panasonic, Toshiba, Sony and HP... /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif
 
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