Old charts still work if you know how to read 'em

Three years ago I was digging a channel near Baton Rouge and the GPS went down. Pulled out some paper charts from 1998 the old foreman left in the truck and finished the job no problem. Has anyone else kept paper backups from before everything went digital?

3 comments

3 Comments

charliestone1mo ago

Hey hold on now. That story about finishing the job with old charts is a good one, but the dates are a little off. NOAA stopped updating paper charts for most places around 2014, not 1998. So those charts from 1998 would be really old, probably missing a lot of changes to the river channels and shoals after all those years. You can still read old charts for sure, but you gotta know the area has moved around since then. The real trick is using them for the big features that don't change much, like the main levee lines and deep holes. But you wouldn't want to rely on a chart that old for a tight channel dig near Baton Rouge without checking the actual depths first.

finley_price241mo ago

Wait did you actually run into trouble trying that with old charts or did it go smooth? I had a similar thing a few years back running a dredge job on the lower Mississippi, we ended up using a mix of 2009 paper charts and a cheap depth finder. The charts got us close enough to the main channel edges but we had to stop every few hundred feet to bounce the bottom with the finder. Saved us from hitting a few new sandbars that weren't on the old paper at all.

juliashah1mo ago

@finley_price24 you ever try explaining to your wife why you keep paper charts in the glove box?