WA State Nautical Charts in Flux

All paper charts across the country were discontinued at the end of last year, leaving electronic navigational charts (ENC) as the only official charts. The shapes and scales of ENC, however, have been fairly chaotic for many years, but it has been planned to change this also for many years. The change is called "rescheming," which will standardize the scales and shapes of the charts, and eventually will also standardize the depth contours. 

At present (end of Oct, 2025) most charts have been reschemed, but only a few have been “metrified” — a NOAA term meaning the depth contours have been converted to a set of standard metric values.  All ENC have heights and depths in meters already, but the all important depth contours are so far only rarely converted. 

Here is a list of references on this process:

US Nautical Charting Plan

NOAA ENC Design Handbook

Rescheming and Improving Electronic Navigational Charts

Rescheming Status

Most of the US has already been reschemed and it is finally reaching into the Pacific NW.

Here is the present state of affairs for WA state charts.

This shows all charts in all scale bands. The scales vary from 1:10,000 to 1:180,000. They include mostly legacy ENC, meaning not reschemed, and a few scale band 4 reschemed charts.

Reschemed bands are defined by

This official NOAA table uses outdated terminology in that "Usage Band" should be called "Scale Band," and "Navigational Purpose" should be called "Usage Band."  Not the end of the world; but not at all useful—a chart name USWA430M means it it is a US chart of the state of WA with a scale band of 4, a number. Usage bands was a term describing paper charts, using the same words as used now, but completely different scale ranges.

WA charts are all less than 49º Lat so new ones will all be made square with regard to distance, ie a scale 4 chart will be 0.3 x 60 = 18 nmi tall and 18 nmi wide, but it will still appear as a rectangle on a mercator chart, with the width to height ratio being the cosine of the latitude. At 47º, for example, width to height on a mercator will be cos(47º) = 0.68.

Here we can see how the legacy scales are being changed from a range of values to just 2 specific values for each band... which seems good progress, but it was not long after making that decision that NOAA decided to change these values to match the proposed new S-101 scales, which are now the new NOAA standard. 

This has meant that most of the earlier reschemed charts at 1:20,ooo and 1:10,000 (Scale Band 5) have to be redone to be 1:22,000 and 1:12,000. That is a transition now in process. The same is true for  Scale Band 4 (1:40,000 and 1:80,000 ) now getting changed to 1:90,000 and 1:45,000. This will not affect the WA charts, because that decision was made before they got to the WA charts in the first place.

The legacy column is a range of scales, but the reschemed options are just two.
See also note in above image above about Scale Bands.

Looking more closely at WA state charts by Scale Band at present:

These are Scale Band 5, which are all legacy except for along the Columbia River, which is covered by a series of 1:12,000 reschemed charts.

We have no Scale Band 6 (Berthing) charts in this region.

We have these three Legacy Scale Band 3 charts

And as of a couple months ago we now have several new Scale Band 4 charts at 1:45,000.

The four irregular shaped charts above (NW most) are the remaining legacy Band 4 we have.

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Now we can get to the punch line: what will this look like sometime next year? Here is that plan for this area...

There are two chart sizes, the larger ones are 1:90,000 along the coast and west of Port Angeles, and 1:45,000 inside of PA. The smaller charts are all 1:12,000.

We see here obvious progress in chart organization, but with a potentially serious step backwards with regard to charting along the coast of Canada—implied by the gap below Vancouver Island. At present we have that coast all covered with ENC (see above) except for the area around Victoria, for which we need just one Canadian chart, CA470075. 

We are up against an IHO rule that a region of adjacent national waters can only be created by one nation, which is what left that gap in our ENC for Victoria, BC.  But US-Canadian hydrographic relations have been in question since 2020, when hydrographic data stopped being shared. So we do not know what is going to take place along that border in the future. At present, no one at NOAA answers emails presumably related to the government shut down. If we learn anything about this, we will post a note.

In the meantime, it seems valuable to download the existing ENC for all of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and San Juans that border on Canada so you have charts. Using qtVlm this is an easy task, just draw a box around the southern half of Vancouver Island and open the NOAA catalog to see what is there and to download the charts.

The charts we want to preserve for back up are: US4WA 30M, 31M, 34M (80k), and 36M (100k) plus US5WA 43M, 44M, 41M (25k)