A few notes from the practice of our navigators:
They don’t plot positions on paper charts. That practice is passé for them. Their main use is in radar-based parallel indexing through a multitude of passes our vessels encounter each voyage. Meaning, the 300 paper charts that we used to carry will be whittled down to a fraction of that number.
Our Navigation Board checked deeper into the issue of the death of paper charts in US/ Canada and the issue is more complex than we had thought.
We had thought the Canadians were ceasing the issuing of all paper charts. After contacting the Canadian Hydrographic Service directly we found this to be untrue. The Canadian print-on-demand service has disappeared , but the Canadians have gone back to government printing of charts. Here is the response we received from the CHS to clarify the point:
CHS not discontinued printing navigational charts, you can still order through a dealer, if they don’t have the chart in stock they can simply place an order through CHS and the order will then be sent to the dealer. Unfortunately, the dealer can no longer print charts on behalf of CHS, charts must be ordered through the dealers GCKEY account or by emailing chs_sales@dfo-mpo.gc.ca and providing their dealer number and order.
So essentially for CHS charts the production of charts has returned to how it was done prior to 1992 or so.
The future of NOAA chart production is hazier. NOAA is phasing out the updating of the digital raster-based files used to create print-on-demand charts. However, dealers can still print these charts using the old files saved by the dealer.
These charts are not corrected to latest NTM, but presumably can be by hand, until such time as a new edition comes out. For many navigators that would be the end of their usefulness.
However, the geography for our region (BC/ Western AK) changes little or not at all, so the lack of continuous chart correction for navaids is of little consequence in the specific context of parallel indexing.
The dealer I spoke with also added these details:
NOAA’s main issue is with raster technology (RNC). NOAA does not want the hassle of supporting this older technology in addition to vector technology (ENC). NOAA has said they will eventually produce ENC based paper charts. Our dealer says he knows they are experimenting with them because he’s seen some preliminary samples.