How to Get a Copy of a Discontinued NOAA Chart

Part 1. I know the name or number of the discontinued chart I want. 

(a) Go to Part 3.

 

Part 2. I do not know what charts were available that no longer exist.

(a) First we need to find out what charts existed. There is a list of all charts at NOAA but we cannot tell from that what they covered, so we use a trick to learn the names of charts and what they covered.  Download this file Historic_NOAA_charts.kml that we will then load into Google Earth (GE), which will show all the historic chart outlines.

 

Above is what you see after dragging the KML file onto GE, or maybe just double clicking the file might open GE and load the KML file.  Then you can zoom into see the charts.

(b) Mouse over a chart outline to highlight it then left click to get the info. This is an example of a discontinued chart, 18433 Haro Strait Middle Bank to Stuart Island. We once had a full set of these spanning the San Juan Islands at 1:25,000 but they are all gone. For now there is just one 1:80,000 for the whole region—but we should get new reschemed 1:22,000 set of ENC sometime early next year.

(Note that if the chart still exists, you can click one of the preview options and see it, but it is easier by other methods to do that....see starpath.com/getcharts.)

For this example, we assume this is the only one we want, ie we want a copy of the Last Edition of this chart, which was discontinued about two years ago—so the one we get is going to be out dated.

(c) Now that we know the chart we want, we can go to Part 3.

Part 3. Get a copy of a chart whose name or number I know

(a) Go this NOAA link historicalcharts.noaa.gov.

(b) On the first page, click the link to Hide the map search.

(c) Then enter the chart number... space is too small but it will take it!  Then press Search.

(d)  Now we see the chart we want, Last Edition of 18433. We can download a JPG of PDF of the image. These PDFs are not georeferenced, like the NCC PDFs are. So if we want to load this chart into a nav program, we might as well use the JPG, which we can manually georeference in several nav programs.  

We can also take a look at the chart with the Preview link. Again, we are looking at an historic item. We could have several reasons to want this, but we must remember it is outdated.

Same image zoomed in to show it is a high-res image.

Part 4. How to load a historic chart (georeferenced) into a navigation program

(a) To be added. It takes just a few steps and a minute or two!