We are in the midst of a revolution in US nautical charting. Traditional paper charts (TPC) have been discontinued by NOAA — a process that started five years ago and is essentially completed now, Fall, 2024. There are a few TPC that can still be purchased from the NOAA print on demand (POD) outlets, but these are all marked "Last Edition" and none have been updated for many months, and never will be.
In short, there are no more TPC for marine navigation, but this is not such a shocking state of affairs as it might appear. There is a new style of paper chart that is intended to replace the TPC called NOAA Custom Charts (NCC) and going forward we will use these for our traditional chart plotting just as we did with the discontinued TPC.
These new charts have in fact notable advantages over the TPC: one being we can make our own NCC using a NOAA online app that lets us choose the area we want to cover — we are no longer bound to the old, fixed regions of the TPC.
We can also choose the chart scale we want and the paper size we want. The products we create are high-resolution precisely-scaled PDFs that we can print as we see best. We have an article on NCC printing options for the several standard NCC sizes. Quite a bit of money can be saved if we do not need the largest sizes printed on high-quality chart paper. If we do want big charts on traditional chart paper, then we can have our own creations printed at one of the POD outlets by sending them your PDF, or you can without doing anything online, just contact them and ask for an NCC version of your favorite TPC.
The new version you will get for a favorite TPC will be essentially identical with regard to the charing in the water, even using the same ATON symbols you are used to. The land areas will have less detail for the time being, but this will improve in the coming months. In the end, the land areas of the charts could well have much more useful detail than the TPC they are replacing.
The NCC are based on the latest electronic navigational charts (ENC), which are updated daily at about 0500 UTC.
The most important fact about these new charts is this: the way we plot our courses and solve for piloting fixes on a paper chart is exactly the same on NCC as it was with TPC. We will just be using chart sizes and areas of our choosing, rather than the fixed TPC options we had in the past. Now we can have a chart of our own Bay on 11x17 paper that we print at home or at the local Office Depot, or an overview that spans three of the past TPC.
Navigation schools also have much more freedom to set up practice exercises in various parts of the country since chartlets can be printed on letter paper. Note that when making your NCC, you have the option to add compass roses where yu want. So this, too, is an advantage as you can place these where ever you think best.
One handicap that they should overcome shortly is the absence of the Mean High Water (MHW) value for the chart. We need this to predict the range of lights and hilltops as well as to compute bridge clearances. Thus we must learn to look this up at www.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov and then write it on the chart somewhere. Strangely, this important number is not so easy to find at NOAA, the video below shows how to find it from the ENC in the background of the NCC app. MHW was always on every TPC, but they have yet to figure how to add it to NCC.
We have several related resources you can use to get involved with the new charts. Here are a couple:
How to make a simple NOAA Custom Chart
How do get a copy of a discontinued NOAA TPC
TPC are being replaced by ENC. Here is our portal to all issues related to ENC
Nautical Chart Notes on NCC, TPC, and ENC
In our online navigation courses we now include exercises using NCC.
