Chart Advice for South Pacific

[Sailabel]

Hi, we're planning on heading to the South Pacific from Mexico this spring. I've priced all the charts for the area (Mexico to New Zealand and Australia), and the total comes to over $1200 (2/3 scale from Bellingham Chart Printers).

Our dillema: we don't know yet where we want to end up or visit (isn't this the purpose of cruising??). One thought is to spend the $$ and get the charts for any of the possibilities. Or, get the minimums and hope to be able to obtain/have shipped additional charts once we reach French Polynesia. It seems like a better idea to have all the charts on board before leaving.....

Any thoughts from those who have been there??? Thanks.
Steve

[Dave852]

One thing for sure is do not plan on purchasing charts after you leave. To buy in FP or to ship charts there would be much more than buying a few unnecessary charts before you leave. Hard to trade with others while out there as you will find few going in the opposite direction. I take it you are using paper charts entirely given how much you have been quoted. It seems for that much money you could almost have electronic charts on board. We purchased backup charts (2/3 scale from Bellingham Chart) for a lot less than that. Of course we did not need the detail you would. We used the navionics electronic charts which cost approximately $300 for all the Pacific islands. They are spot on in FP as they purchased the French charts for the data. You could buy a low cost program to display the navionics on a laptop assuming there is no plotter? Another option place an ad on trademe.com in NZ wanting to buy another cruisers charts. The pacific fleet will be arriving there next month. Or just contact them directly via their blogs.

[Sailabel]

Dave- thanks for the response and info. We do have a chartplotter and will be purchasing the Navionics e-charts in addition to charts for the computer. Even with this, I'm a believer that I'm only 1 lightning strike away (or electrical failure) from paper charts. As a result, I want to insure that we have the appropriate paper charts, not only for back-ups, but to plot our positions as we cruise.

I'm thinking more about just having larger scale charts.

This is getting even more expensive with the Navionics chips: about $300 each; one for the islands, one for New Zealand, and one for Eastern Australia.

But, nobody ever told me that sailing/cruising would be cheap.

[MarkJ]

Originally Posted by Sailabel

Any thoughts from those who have been there??? Thanks.
Steve

Buy the electronic charts for $250. Paper is useless.
Get Google Earth too.

[rusky]

I think you need both.

You can always sell paper charts later on to other suckers hell bent on repeating others' previous mistakes (sorry, I mean cruisers')

[Refugee]

Seems to me that one could do both; I agree that one lightning strike or short circuit would leave electronic charts worthless, so if nothing else a reasonable paper backup would be valuable.