"Free" is not a term you often associate with boating. Some people will even tell you that the word "boat" is an acronym for "Break Out Another Thousand." But the U.S. government does indeed provide boaters with a great deal of material – much of at no charge – if you know where to look.
Uncle Sam's best-known free marine resource is probably electronic navigation charts. The U.S. government stands alone among nations, offering charts in both raster and vector formats for download at no charge. Other countries, such as Canada, still charge boaters to obtain their charts.
Both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, commonly called NOAA, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers offer charts for U.S. waters. These charts are regularly updated and can be printed or used with computer-based navigation programs to both plan a cruise and navigate your boat. (Mad Mariner's Hard facts on Software series described electronic charting in great detail.)
But charts are not the only resource offered by the government. Uncle Sam also offers lists of corrections to keep your charts up to date; Coast Pilots to let you know what to expect at the next port; and Pilot Charts to tell you the average weather for all parts of the globe. Using these tools together with your charts will give you a great deal of valuable information about the waters you travel.
Of course, there are stores that will change you for these same publications. But the information is available free to anyone with an Internet connection and some time – again, if you know where to look.
NOTICE TO MARINERS
Two important resources are the Notice to Mariners and the Local Notice to Mariners. All charts, even the electronic ones, have a publication date. This is the date that the chart was "locked in." Anything that changes after that date has to be changed by hand – by you – to keep the chart up to date.
These changes can be as simple as a buoy that has been temporarily removed for maintenance or as sophisticated as the addition of a new channel. For the chart to be considered "legal," it has to be updated, especially if you are a licensed captain who carries paying passengers.
The U.S. Coast Guard is one of the agencies responsible for keeping track of all the changes on charts and notifying mariners of those changes. To do this, the government produces two sets of documents, known as the Notice to Mariners and the Local Notice to Mariners. In the past, these weekly publications were sent to captains who had provided the Coast Guard with a mailing address. Now, they are posted electronically.
COAST GUARDInformation on the Local Notice to Mariners can be found at the Coast Guard's Web site, and you can use that site to download the most recent local notices in a PDF format.
A Local Notice to Mariners is published for each of the nine Coast Guard districts. If your boating is confined to a single area, you can sign up for the local notice of just that district. The local notices are the first published source of changes to charts and related publications. The notice system is also used for notifications about outages to GPS satellites, changes in technical specifications and even information about important events that might affect boating traffic.
Information on the Local Notice to Mariners can be found at the Coast Guard's website, and you can use this site to download the most recent local notices in a PDF format (this makes them searchable, by the way). You can also sign up to be notified via email as new notices become available. Again, this is all free.
The Notice to Mariners, also published on a weekly basis, covers the entire collection of U.S. nautical publications and are not restricted to a specific location. It is designed to be used by oceangoing vessels and may not always have corrections for charts that are inland of the major bays and sounds. In the past, information generally was published first in the Local Notice to Mariners and then was added to the Notice to Mariners, but with the advent of electronic databases and online dissemination, that's not always the case anymore.
Because the Notice to Mariners is published by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, based on information prepared jointly by the Coast Guard and NOAA's National Ocean Service, they are available from the NGA website, also in PDF format. Because of the size of the notices, they can be downloaded as a single file or in smaller subsections as needed. Generally, it's advisable to read all of the notices online before deciding what to download and store.
