The revolution has been postponed: the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office has delayed the phasing out of its Admiralty paper charts for four years, to 2030. This follows pressure from the Royal Yachting Association and others.
The argument against losing paper charts sooner is that adequate electronic alternatives for small craft – especially small commercial ones – will not be ready in time.
I assume this means officially approved, high-quality electronic charts designed for the relatively simple equipment that small craft use. These are not currently available on the market.
The vast majority of electronic charts in use by smaller craft are not officially authorised by national hydrographic authorities – hence the prominent, but universally ignored, warnings that they must not be used for navigation.
Their quality control and some of their operational features are not good enough to satisfy official standards: one key feature missing from most is reliability information – the electronic equivalent of the diagrams on Admiralty charts showing age of seabed surveys. Leisure charts do have the advantage, of course, of being cheap compared with the officially approved versions used by ships.
The day before the RYA announced it had won a four year reprieve for paper, I filled in a survey on chart usage by SHOM, the French equivalent of the UKHO, which is also trying to establish what to do about paper charts. The survey was forwarded by the RIN to its members. SHOM does seem to be keener than the UKHO to continue with paper.
The Royal Institute of Navigation and other bodies including the RYA are trying to improve leisure chart standards to the point where they can gain some sort of official approval. But it’s a slow process.
Meanwhile, we all have to carry on using what are basically sub-standard charts. Remember that next time you read advertising guff about how wonderful the various leisure chart brands are.
I’ve had quite a few emails recently from Orca, a navigation equipment and software firm, boasting about the 3 metre location accuracy of their equipment as a major selling point. It’s a waste of marketing effort, as far as I’m concerned.
Three metre satellite accuracy – available nowadays even on some top of the range phones – is no use when round much of the British Isles chart positions can be far less accurate.
Orca equipment and software do look temptingly attractive on paper, and I have no doubt that their 3 metre claim about their GNSS equipment is accurate. But that’s not how we should be thinking about satellite positions in practical navigation.
Passing through the Thames Array – one of the few places in the estuary where we trust the chart.
In many places we sail, such as the Western Isles, the West of Ireland and, much nearer to home, most of the Thames Estuary, it’s particularly risky to expect your charts to be able to match anything like that standard.
In the Thames Estuary, 3 metre satellite accuracy is irrelevant for a small boat that needs to keep out of the main channels and use swatchways and other routes less frequented by commercial traffic. The only short cut I know where the chartplotter positions are reliable is through the Thames Array windfarm, which you’d expect to be charted and updated to high precision.
But generally, the depths are changing all the time and charts cannot keep up outside the main ship channels. Valiant efforts are made by amateurs to track the changes, especially East Coast Pilot and Roger Gaspar’s Crossing the Thames Estuary
They publish plenty of examples of rapidly changing profiles of the sea bed. Recently they noted how several yachts had gone aground together on the Sunk (I think it was) because they followed their chartplotters.
Last year (2021) we crossed the Sunk in May and by August when we came back to the Solent an alert had already been put out by Gaspar that the sand had shifted the swatchway since the spring. No published chart of the Thames Estuary, paper or electronic, can keep up with that pace of change.
Ireland has been updating the once notoriously old surveys of its West Coast, and charts were supposed to have been much improved by the last time we visited. But inshore, for instance along the Connemara coast, we still assumed 100 metres error, to give ourselves a safe margin. In some places, that meant focusing on old methods, and ignoring the plotter.
In the west of Scotland, Bill Bradshaw has done a great service over the last 15 years or so with his Antares charts of anchorages. We have used them, and hope to again, but they are not official charts. In fact, one thing they have done is expose how out of date other paper and electronic inshore charts actually are, based on surveys sometimes unchecked since the 19th century.
I’m not criticising the Orca products, which I’m sure are fine, and I will try out their app next season. It’s the marketing message that I take issue with.
Update, Jan 2023: Bill Bradshaw gave an excellent talk in London this month on his charts, and on the deficiencies of official charts in Scotland. It was organised by the Little Ship Club and the Royal Institute of Navigation (of which I’m a member).
The near-universal shift by small boat sailors from paper to electronic charts has left the Royal Yachting Association’s training courses floundering in recent years.
That was underlined when Admiralty, owned by the UK Hydrographic Office and one of the world’s gold standard official chart brands, said in July that it will stop selling paper charts altogether by the end of 2026.
The RYA’s response was that it would “continue to teach both traditional and electronic navigational techniques through its range of courses, although over time it is right to expect the weight of emphasis to shift towards more digitally based techniques.”
I’m afraid that’s a bit late. Implying that the shift is in the future is wrong. It has already happened and it’s been obvious for years which way the wind has been blowing.
The Golden Globe race is a trial of old skills, and its ban on satellite navigation makes it stand out – a living museum of navigation
The first signs of the shift to electronics actually arrived many years ago when ships were first allowed to abandon paper, and worldwide sales of paper charts soon started to plummet.
But in the small boat world, the RYA reaction until recently was to make excuses about why it could not start systematically training candidates on day skipper and yachtmaster courses in the use of electronic charts. People were given some instruction and tips about safe use of electronic charts but were basically left to pick up for themselves how to operate a real chartplotter.
It was only in January this year that the RYA announced it was hiring a new training manager to tackle these issues after a two year gap in filling the position, and results are still awaited.
You only need to read the RYA’s training publications and syllabuses to see that this modernisation should have started a long time ago. Then compare with a book such as Stress Free Navigation by Duncan Wells (Adlard Coles), which teaches the old methods alongside the new, and you can see how the RYA has missed out.
This month the RYA strategic report said that it had “begun on modernising” shorebased navigation courses, and the review would run into 2023. Details would begin to roll out to instructors and training centres later this year. The word ‘begun’ at this stage of the electronic revolution on boats rather stands out.
The strongest argument the RYA used over the years for not upgrading training in electronic charts was that there was no uniformity among leisure chartplotter systems, so it was impossible to teach how to use them in a coherent way. That now seems to reveal a lack of determination, ingenuity and ambition.
Another rather legalistic argument was that leisure charts are not currently approved for navigation by maritime authorities (see the warnings when you open your charts). But again, things have moved on: everyone does use them, and that includes many fishing boats and small commercial craft. The ‘not for navigation’ warning is a problem that needs solving by higher leisure chart production standards, and it will be in the next few years.
Another thought I heard expressed at the top of the RYA was that if you encourage electronic navigation by bringing it to the forefront of training you’d undermine the all-important teaching of traditional navigation. In the extreme, you’d end up with people who do not have a clue what to do if their electronics fails, and – horror of horrors – they might even be doing it all on a phone app.
But as a Royal Institute of Navigation survey three years ago found, most leisure sailors by then already relied mainly on electronic charts, paper had become largely a backup, and few even bothered to correct their paper charts any more, because electronic charts can be updated frequently and reliably.
That was a survey of experienced members (I remember filling it in). I would guess that the younger and less experienced were by then automatically gravitating to apps, the internet and electronic navigation because that’s how most people under 40 live their lives. If you take up sailing, where’s the first place you search for advice? Maybe U-tube? You’d find plenty of material about modern navigation methods and you would already be entirely accustomed to relying on electronics.
Before going any further, I have to say I am strongly in favour of learning traditional methods alongside electronic navigation, for a variety of good reasons which I’ve set out in the new updated edition of Pass Your Day Skipper (out in the New Year from Adlard Coles).
But given the ease and cheapness with which multiple independently powered back up systems can be brought on board (think laptops, tablets and mobile phones) the much-repeated threat that you must learn the old methods or you’d be lost if your batteries failed is now rather lame. The stronger case for learning both methods is much less dramatic: they are complementary, and each helps to better understand and use the other safely.
A modernised chart table on an old boat – ours. Two raster charts are being tested on tablets (Imray and VMH’s UKHO charts). The ancient Garmin GPS is still working and is connected to the DSC radio. The main chartplotter uses C-Map vector charts and is installed in front of the wheel in the cockpit.
There will be more to say on the consequences of Admiralty’s abandonment of paper charts in subsequent posts.
The small craft navigation conference in Cowes at the end of January heard that the RYA is finally promising to overhaul its outdated Day Skipper and Yachtmaster shore-based courses.
The conference was also told that there is to be a concerted attempt to abolish that annoying legal disclaimer on all our electronic charts that they are “not for navigation.” As soon as we switch on a pop-up appears with this message, often with a line underneath saying that only paper charts must be used, which of course almost everybody ignores.
First, the RYA: any novice has noticed for years when boarding a cruising or racing boat that most navigation is electronic and paper charts are relegated to backup. Surveys of skippers have proved that.
The approach of RYA shore-based courses has been like getting into a car with full satnav, and being told not to switch it on but instead to dig out the AA road map from under the back seat.
After a 2 year gap without a manager for the Day Skipper and Yachtmaster shore-based courses, an executive has now been hired, and the promise is that course improvements will be a high priority this year. A better integration of training for electronic charting and traditional navigation is long overdue. More on that another time.
Second, that warning notice on our charts: it has become a joke, but it’s no laughing matter. It reflects some real quality and standards issues affecting leisure charts, which is why official hydrographic bodies will not licence their data to publishers unless they use the disclaimer. This is also the legal position, because under international maritime law only official charts from hydrographic offices are recognised.
Many fishing boats use the same charts as yachts
That’s not a problem to worry about if you are a leisure sailor on a modest size yacht. But it is an issue for large numbers of small commercial vessels, including fishing boats and indeed for sail training yachts and large private yachts.
They are all under that same restrictive legal umbrella, but they mostly ignore it and use cheap leisure electronic charts anyway, because official electronic charts and equipment are so expensive. In theory they are supposed to navigate only on paper, but the law is honoured only in the breach.
The Royal Institute of Navigation, whose small craft group organised the conference, is now leading an attempt to get something done about it.
The plan is to seek minimum standards for leisure charts and chart plotters. This would be in the hope of improving them to the point at which there can be some form of official recognition, and removal of the warning.
The RIN has involved the RYA, the Cruising Association, the Marine and Coastguard Agency, the UKHO, the Marine Accidents Board, the RNLI, chart publishers, equipment firms and various other interests. The focus is a new Pleasure Vessel Navigation Systems Working Group, reporting to the UK Safety of Navigation Committee, which is under the MCA.
There is no plan to set detailed specifications – attempts to do that for the fishing industry in the UK and similar projects in Denmark and Italy failed. Instead, standards would be developed setting out what the charts should do and the functions equipment must contain in order to be approved. Manufacturers and publishers would find their own way of meeting these standards.
For example, some measure of underlying accuracy should be available, as it is on official ship charts and on Admiralty paper charts, where survey age is shown. You then know if the last survey was in 1930 or thereabouts (or indeed 1849, a contributory cause to an oil rig grounding under tow in the Orkneys in 2006).
One proposal is a much simpler traffic light system, with the colours related to the reliability of the information, including survey date.
Other issues include clear separation between crowd-sourced feedback and more rigorous survey information, which are in danger of getting mixed up in some chart brands.
Updating should also be reliable and easy. Shore features should be shown clearly on all charts, and there should be ways of drawing bearing lines from them, measured by the navigator and plotted onto screens to give a traditional fix.
Ideally, all electronic chartplotters should have a common default method of operation so anybody can switch boats and still work the plotter. That is the case with ship electronic systems, but it’s a long way from being taken seriously by leisure chartplotter makers.
The objective is to make leisure chart standards high enough to allow that disclaimer to be removed – and while it may be asking too much for international authorities to accept it, perhaps it will be known instead as the RIN standard.
It will not be simple or quick to achieve, and there are legal obstacles, too – where would liability end up if a faulty leisure chart causes an accident? But that warning as we switch on is a technical issue of real importance.
After a scrub
Meanwhile, on Spring Fever: We took the boat out of the water at the Kingston yard in Cowes for an insurance survey at the end of January. The boat turns out to be basically fine, but we’ve decided to preempt what will probably be an instruction from the insurance company anyway: we’ll replace the standing rigging, now in its 14th year.
It seems that while my phone is accurate to an error of considerably less than 10 metres, the industry is heading to even better precision of a tenth of that level, and soon. This post looks at why that means satellite accuracy on all devices including smartphones is reaching levels where there are diminishing returns for small boat sailors.
In general, 5 metre satellite accuracy has been available on smartphones for a considerable time now. I give links at the end to industry, US government, academic and consumer articles that give more detail on how accuracy has been developing (and see also my earlier post ‘and a phone to steer her by’).
One of the secrets of the top performers such as the high-end Samsung phones, which can achieve 2 metres, is that they now have dual frequency satellite aerials so they can make the best use of the latest improvements not only in the US GPS, but the Russian Glonass, European Galileo and Chinese Beidou satellite systems. Nowadays, phones will often have as many as 40 satellites in the sky from which to choose the best signals.
Mobiles have had a bad press as navigational tools, but if I were forced to choose one single piece of electronics to take to sea it would be my phone. That’s not a popular view among professionals.
Instructors, coastguards and rescue services learn of many cases where boat owners, especially of powerful motor yachts and RIBs, set off for the open sea with nothing beyond a chart app on a mobile phone, and no knowledge of the underlying skills needed to navigate safely. For the Royal Yachting Association, mobiles are well down the list of recommended priorities, because of the risk that they will be used badly. Textbooks give stern warnings that you must not use them for navigation.
I was intrigued by the equipment list below, which is more than three decades old, because it was a reminder of how long we have been arguing about the risks and rewards of electronic navigation. I found the list in some old files I was checking last year for the sixth edition of Pass Your Yachtmaster by David Fairhall and Mike Peyton, which I was commissioned to update by Adlard Coles*.
A 1989 list of yacht electronics talked about at the Boat Show
The list was part of an article I produced for the Guardian newspaper about electronics for small boat navigation, under the headline ‘And a satellite to steer her by’, researched by talking to manufacturers due to appear at that year’s London Boat Show. I had forgotten all about it.
How accurate is the position calculated by your smartphone? The Royal Institute of Navigation is sceptical. Its new book on electronic navigation for leisure sailors says: “At sea, mobile phone positioning uncertainty will typically be several hundred meters or more, which may be enough to put us into danger”.
I am looking for some proper studies on this issue, because I am sceptical about that statement. In the meantime it’s easy to check what your phone tells you about its own location performance when it relies only on satellite signals.
Two letters in the latest issue of the excellent Cruising Association magazine* claim it is now safe to rely entirely on electronic charts because backups to the boat’s main chartplotter are so cheaply available. You can leave your old paper charts abandoned in the bottom of a locker somewhere, the argument goes.
However, while researching updates for the yachtmaster book I mentioned last month, I’ve been re-reading intensively about old fashioned navigation techniques I learnt a long time ago, some of which were beginning to fade from memory. It has reinforced for me how important it is to avoid total reliance on electronics and have a portfolio of navigation skills including the old ones. Continue reading “Relearning old navigation lessons”
The British government turns out to have been ahead of the game on the satellite risks I mentioned last month, with a £36 million programme just announced to prevent navigational satellite failures damaging the economy by as much as £1 billion a day. It is feared that the entire country has become over-dependent on a handful of satellite systems.
Emergency services, the energy grid, mobile phones, Satnav, broadcasting and other communications, the Stock Exchange and an array of other activities all rely heavily on the super-accurate timing provided now by navigational satellites such as GPS and similar systems. There are life-threatening risks from failure, says the government.An image of a third generation Lockheed Martin GPS satellite
The new investment is in a National Timing Centre to create a network of super-accurate atomic clocks around the UK, accessed through ground-based communications, so that the economy will no longer be over-reliant on timing from GNSS signals from the sky.
GNSS is the term that embraces the US GPS, the first system, Russia’s GLONASS satellites, Europe’s new Galileo and also a rapidly developing Chinese system.
Galileo failed completely for a while last year during its start up phase, because of operator errors, and there are now many examples of interference with GNSS systems and malicious ‘spoofing’, in which navigation instruments are fooled into thinking they are somewhere else. The heart of all navigation by satellite is accurate timing, without which positions cannot be fixed.
At the Royal Institute of Navigation’s small boat conference in Lymington earlier this month, I learnt a lot about new risks of error in satellite navigation : I did not know, for example, that it is possible with quite cheap local equipment to fool the GPS on a plane, ship or even a missile into thinking it is somewhere other than its real position.
There are now tens of thousands of reported incidents of errors, deliberate, accidental or of unknown cause, with a substantial number of them unsurprisingly in sensitive areas such as the Gulf, and the Black Sea near Ukraine, suspected to be hostile activity.
Reports of accidental errors include a couple of local failures when US naval vessels arrived in the port of San Diego, apparently forgetting to switch off unspecified electronic equipment, which interfered with satellite-derived positions for miles around.
Footnote to cruising the Scillies: piloting there is a reminder of the importance of proper Admiralty charts, because they show the age of the surveys on which they are based, unlike any of the proprietary ‘vector’ charts available on chartplotters.
The Scillies is a mixed area from this point of view. Some of the surveys of the area were last done in 1860 – 1904 by lead line, probably from boats carried on naval survey ships and rowed up and down in straight lines quite a long way apart, so rocks could easily be missed. Other parts of the islands were surveyed at a range of different dates in the 20th century.Continue reading “Is your chart relying on an 1860 survey?”
Several earlier posts covered inaccuracies in charts. Last week I came across yet another example in Cala de Portinax, a bay at the north end of Ibiza in the Balearics. This screen shot from my Navionics chart shows depths in a fair amount of detail: yet the numbers were wrong by a factor of three or four. Because of the modest depths shown, we motored in with great trepidation in Olivia Jane, a Beneteau 43 with a 2 metre draft. Yet we found the depths in the middle of the bay were all in the 11-13 metre range and even close in to the rocky shore we anchored in 8 metres. In contrast, the C-Map chart on the cockpit plotter gave no depths at all inside the bay, which is a safer option than mistaken information. We’ve fed this back to Navionics and await a reply, but the nagging question will always remain in future, even if this proves to be a rare mistake: can we trust the inshore information on these charts? What if the mistake had been the other way, showing 11 metres when only 2 metres was there? Do other brands of charts have similar errors? Continue reading “Chart errors (contd).”
Data published by the International Hydrographic Organisation shows up a surprising fact: the UK and Ireland are below Turkey in the league table of survey quality by area of national waters. Spain, Portugal and France score much higher than the UK.Continue reading “Marine survey accuracy”
Since looking into chart accuracy following the Orkney cruise (see previous article) I’ve spent a couple of months in the Mediterranean. It’s much worse there.
I vaguely knew that, but previous sailing in the Mediterranean had been without chartplotters and on the earliest occasions without GPS. More recently, chartplotters seem to be standard on charter boats as well as private yachts. We amused ourselves by doing some checking. Continue reading “Med charter disaster?”
An image of a third generation Lockheed Martin GPS satellite
tide by tide 