Uncovering The Hidden Dangers of Outdated Maritime Maps

If you’re about to set off on a maritime journey, it’s critical to update your charts with the latest information.

Boat Books, the leading supplier of maritime maps in Australia, offers correcting services to ensure your charts stay up to date year-round. Let’s take a look at why it’s so important to ensure your charts are updated before setting out on a voyage.

Safety

Up-to-date maps offer crucial details about water depth, possible hazards for navigation, shipping lanes, and any other navigational aids, such as buoys or lighthouses. If your maps and charts are not updated, they might not accurately depict recent changes to the environment, such as shifts in underwater topography, the development of new sandbars, or changes in reefs.

Newly submerged obstacles could pose a serious risk to a vessel’s safety. If there has been a new shoal or shift in navigational channels due to natural forces like storms or currents, older charts might not reflect these, potentially landing you in deep trouble.

Therefore, it is important to update your charts to avoid unforeseen obstructions and accidental collisions, which could endanger your crew, passengers, cargo, and the vessel itself.

Regulatory Compliance

Setting out at sea means that you need to adhere to standards of navigational safety according to maritime regulations.

For instance, the International Maritime Organisation’s Safety of Life at Sea Convention mandates that vessels carry nautical charts updated with the latest information. If you don’t comply with these mandates, you could face legal consequences such as hefty fines or the suspension of your operating licence.

Informed Route Planning

The maritime environment is constantly evolving thanks to things like dredging operations, the construction of new ports, the addition of offshore installations, and alterations in shipping routes.

These things change regularly for a variety of reasons, and so up-to-date charts are crucial to ensuring that accurate information about these movements is on hand. This enables you to navigate safely around new structures or altered waterways, which could prevent any potential problems from arising.

For example, you might be faced with a new bridge or a new wind farm built out at sea, which could obstruct traditional shipping lanes or cause unnecessary adjustments to navigational routes.

As Australia’s largest specialist marine bookshop and chart agent, we offer a correcting service for out-of-date documents. Contact Boat Books before you set out on your voyage to ensure that you have the latest maritime maps on hand.