Why I'll never cruise without paper charts

[Jay Knoll]

I've read a fair amount of chatter recently that there is no need for paper charts since the electronic ones are so good.

Well that is fine as long as everything works but what happens when your electronics go awry? We have an old northstar system that was on the boat when we bought it. The problem is that we can't get updated charts for the unit. So we've been using an iPad with an external gps as our chart plotter. Worked great until the last iOS update, now the gps doesn't talk to the iPad. Fortunately we hadn't updated my wife's iPad so we have a working solution but we would have been sol if we had updated both. It is great to have paper as a backup..

Jay

[Nancy]

Agreed! We will never give up paper charts or paper road maps. In addition to being foolproof backup, they are the most efficient way to get an overview of the area and the route.

[Marcy K]

We agree 100%. Always have paper charts of routes/destinations. We also have paper maps in the car along with the gps.

Marcy K
A 34 Paumaonk 1986
Catuamet, MA

[jleonard]

Never say never!

While I don't "normally" cruise without paper charts, I have had to at times. Once on a trip to the Chesapeake Bay somehow we forgot to put our Barnegat Bay chart in the bag. So do I spend the night anchored in the Atlantic or do I enter Barnegat Inlet with no chart?
Into the inlet I go and follow the buoys and that was without a chart plotter.
2 years ago on out trip to Canada and thru the Trent system we didn't have paper charts for the lakes, etc (totally forgot to source them) but we went thru (and back) using just the old small Garmin plotter. Not really a problem.

So I "never" cruise without paper charts either......but sometimes I do.