I’m fascinated. I’d imagine that lots of Navagear readers might feel the same way. Let’s dig in and see what’s up…
The NOAA BookletChart™ is an experimental product that you can print at home for free. They are made to help recreational boaters locate themselves on the water.
The Booklet Chart is reduced in scale and divided into pages for convenience, but otherwise contains all the information of the full-scale nautical chart. Bar scales are also reduced in scale, but are accurate when used to measure distances in a BookletChart. Excerpts from the United States Coast Pilot are included. Most chart notes are consolidated on a single page for easy reference. Emergency information for the charted area is printed on the back cover.
Booklet charts are updated weekly for all Notice to Mariners.
NOTE: During this experimental period, BookletCharts are not being updated every week with Notices to Mariners. Further, some known errors are known to exist, e.g. the "Approximate Page Index" might not match the chart inside. You can tell us about such errors by using the Coast Survey’s Inquiry Page.
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Tim, I’ve been using these for a while. The concept is interesting, but how useful it is depends on the nature of the charts. For example, intracoastal waterway charts (like say 11319 0r 11322, which I use a lot), where the part you are interested in is long and thin, translate very well into this medium – you can just turn the page as you go along and it’s easy to get oriented. Other sorts of charts, where you might want to go in any number of directions aren’t as easy to use because the next page you’re interested in usually isn’t the next page in the booklet. Still, people have managed with road atlases made this way for years, so it’s certainly doable, and being able to produce them on your home printer is handy.