Keeping the Charts Up-to-Date

As a navigating officer one of my main tasks was to correct the charts. I was guided by the Admiralty publication NP 294 How to Correct Your Charts the Admiralty Way.

My tools consisted of a parallel ruler, divider and a set of plastic protractor and scale. I had a hack-saw blade to draw zigzag lines on the chart representing submarine cables.

The chart corrections came in the form of Notices to Mariners (NtMs). Ntms have evolved from the time ships started sailing with paper charts. In the early years a mariner depended on important navigational information passed by word of mouth amongst fellow mariners.

At some point of time, probably a hundred years back some Hydrographic Offices (HOs) started collating this information. They verified the information before distributing them to the ships through print. This lent an authenticity to the information.

Since then NtMs have become an integral part of charts and publications required to be maintained on board for safety of navigation.

I remember, whenever we entered a port after a long voyage, there would invariably be a stack of four to five weeks worth of NtM packs waiting for me.

Most times the ship would anchor off some big port and would remain there for days till we got an available berth alongside. The anchorage is the best time to correct the charts. I would spend many hours bent over a chart table to clear the backlog. There was a time when I used croquils dipped in black or magenta indelible inks. Later I used Pilot Hi-tech 0.5mm pens. One could practice draughtsman ship with these pens. I would painstakingly draw the figures and shapes from INT1 on the charts.

Once in a while I would look up and watch the enticing skyline of Singapore from the bridge windows. Or look around our anchored ship to find a pleasure boat drifting past rocked by an amorous couple in it. The thought would cross my mind that perhaps I had missed out on life imprisoned in a ship with nothing to do except correct charts whilst the rest of the world enjoyed.

Manual updating of charts is a very tedious and monotonous job. Now with electronic charts on the verge of replacing paper charts, the need for manual updating is going to disappear for ever. This tedious job will be taken over by the machines. A task which used to take many hours can now be completed within a few minutes with the click of a button.

Automatic updating is not only a great time-saver but has also removed a major source of human error. They tell us that eighty percent of all errors are caused due to the human factor.

How often do marine incidents happen because of uncorrected charts? A difficult question to answer; but one can trawl through various sites on the net which lists marine accidents and get an idea. There are a host of sites such as IMO's GISIS database, MAIB and BSU. Or one can commission mac@maritimeaccident.org to do the research.

There is an interesting site called ‘Centre for Tankship Excellence’ created by a naval architect, Jack Devanney. As a tankerman he felt ‘the oil tanker industry had lost its way’. And so he must do something about it.

Here there is a database of tanker casualties that is openly available to the public. We can list tanker incidents caused due to navigation errors specifically due to bad charts as a result of the ship’s fault. It means either the ship did not update the charts or were not carrying the appropriate charts.

Incidents such as Globtik Sun and Sanko Harvest were caused due to uncorrected charts. If we go by the philosophy of the accident pyramid, then for every reported incident there are a hundred more which went unreported.

With automatic updates the Master gets the corrections when he wants. For example just before entering a harbour or transiting through a narrow channel. One doesn’t have to wait for the physical arrival of the NtM packs by post.

In this age of reduced manning on commercial ships automatic updating helps the Master to regain the services of the second mate for other equally important tasks required to run the ship.