Nicaragua constructs enormous canal, blind to its environmental cost

 This Google Map traces the path of the proposed Nicaragua Grand Canal, that is suspected now under construction, through the mountainous regions of the Nicaraguan ecosystem in order to understand the enormity of the project and its economic and environmental impact on the actual rivers involved.

In other words, unlike conceptual maps that do not really show the areas involved in detail, this map enables you to zoom in close in order to determine the impact for yourself.

source MyReadingMapped

From Scientific American by Pablo Fonseca

Work has already begun on a canal three times the length of Panama’s, which will cut through forests, wetlands, native reserves and a lake

The Nicaragua Grand Canal will be a project of unprecedented magnitude.
The canal’s route has already been determined, as is the number of ships that will be permitted to pass through it each day.
Also decided is who will construct the canal and how many square kilometers of earth must be moved.
What remains unknown is the environmental impact of this potential new slice through Central America.
Nicaragua’s government proposed the project and put the construction of the canal into the hands of Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development (HKND), all without soliciting any environmental studies. And now the government claims construction has started.

 Credit: La Voz Sandinista

Nicaragua Pres. Daniel Ortega sees the canal as positive not only for the country, but for the all of Central America.
He has said nothing, however, about the lack of an environmental impact review.
“Today we are a region where we defend the principle of sovereignty...so it is no coincidence that this work begins when in our America we have managed to make this great historical leap toward the integration and unity of our people and our entire region,” Ortega said hours before marking what he called the beginning of construction on December 22, 2014.

Just six days earlier a study on the environmental impact was released, but not for the canal project itself, rather on preliminary construction.
The research was paid for by HKND and performed by consultant firm ERM without government involvement.

The cost of the Nicaragua Grand Canal construction is estimated at $50 billion.
When complete, it would measure 278 kilometers long, whereas the Panama Canal is 77 kilometers long. Its width is set to vary between 230 and 520 meters, with a protection border of five kilometers on either side of the canal.
A large part of the channel would pass through Lake Nicaragua (also known as Lake Cocibolca), the largest tropical lake in Central America.
Construction is estimated to take five years, with completion in 2020.
Ortega announced in February 2012 that the project would resume after being first raised as a possibility in the 19th century.
In July 2012 the nation’s National Assembly approved a special law that would support construction and give wider benefits to the contractor, such as a guarantee of zero criminal punishment for breach of contract, which closed with HKND in June 2013.

What does the preliminary report say?

Despite Ortega’s statement, ERM’s press department denied that construction has started in Nicaragua.
Instead, it tells Scientific American that work has begun on “improvements” to enable field studies, including cleanup and the construction of access routes.
The preliminary work is classified as “modest” because it includes primarily the construction and improvement of access routes, the clearing of a corridor 50 meters wide and almost 24 kilometers long, and support facilities.
The report said that various problems involving just preliminary construction cannot truly be overcome, even if remedies recommended in the report are implemented.
The most troubling part of the report notes the potential for fuel spills to affect freshwater fish in the area, interrupt agricultural activity and impact cultural heritage on native reserves as a result of work that disturbs the soil.
The report also stated “the acquisition and compensation for the land deal…do not meet international standards.”
Along those lines a series of protests in Nicaragua in late 2014 criticized the manner in which the land was acquired.
Dozens of people were arrested, and international agencies confirmed two deaths.
Scientific American received no reply to requests for interviews about these events with representatives of HKND and Nicaragua’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources.

Warnings from scientists around the world

Scientists worldwide also have expressed doubts about the project.
For example, the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) wrote that the canal will affect “some 4,000 square kilometers of forest, coast and wetlands,” which include the system of wetlands of San Miguelito (protected area under The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, aka Ramsar Convention, which Nicaragua signed); the Cerro Silva Natural Reserve; the Río San Juan Biosphere Reserve, which contains seven protected areas, including the Los Guatuzos Wildlife Reserve, the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve and the Solentiname Archipelago.

According to ATBC’s statement, this network of reserves “is the habitat of at least 22 species that are vulnerable and in danger of extinction, according to the Red List of [Threatened Species issued by] the IUCN [International Union for Conservation of Nature], including tapirs, jaguars, turtles, marine life, corals and other species; some of the rarest and untouched surviving mangroves, coral reefs, dry forests, rainforests and lakeside habitats that still exist in Central America.”
The statement also said, “The Mesoamerican Biological corridor, designed by governments in the region, would be split in half, and the canal and its infrastructure would create a huge barrier to the movement of plants and animals.”
The international body warned the time has come to “suspend all activity related to the construction of the canal and its subprojects until the conclusion of independent studies and all concerns are adequately addressed.”

Meanwhile the International Society of Limnology issued a statement [pdf] warning that the construction and operation of the canal would compromise the function of Lake Nicaragua as a high-quality source of potable and irrigation water and as key to maintaining biodiversity.
“These negative impacts could see an increase in future periods of drought due to climate change,” according to the group.
International standards “require that environmental studies are completed, revised, and published before work begins.
The actions of the government are creating an environment of mistrust, confrontation and repression. We ask the government of Nicaragua to halt this project until these studies are completed and publically debated,” the statement concluded.

The Humboldt Center of Nicaragua issued a statement along the same lines in a recent study [pdf]. According to their calculations, the canal would require 7.5 million cubic meters of water per day in the rainy season and 8.44 million during the dry season.
And models of climate change’s impact on Nicaragua predict that by the year 2039, engineers operating the canal should anticipate a 3 to 4 percent water deficit.

The Nicaraguan Academy of Sciences also raises a voice

One of the major local critics of the project’s management has been the country’s academy of sciences.
Vice Pres. Jorge Huete-Pérez, a biologist, published an editorial on the subject in Science magazine with other specialists. In an interview with Scientific American, Huete-Pérez says the main concern of the scientific community is what could happen to the water of Lake Nicaragua.
“In the future climate change will affect us, there will be long droughts and the lake is a reservoir,” he says.
“Is it worth sacrificing a source of drinking water, which also serves agriculture and tourism?”
Huete-Pérez also questioned the way in which the project was discussed before being officially contracted, with little transparency and many questions left unanswered. “Something is clear, which is the interest in building the canal without interest in the consequences,” he adds.
“The foundation of the canal is not clear: there is no business plan, no data on the level of uncertainty nor the benefits. What is being done is irresponsible.”

Despite this situation, Huete-Pérez offers a solution that could be satisfactory to all parties, which he alluded to in his Science editorial: Nicaragua’s government could “reconsider the project with international standards in mind” and assign the project’s supervision to an independent national commission.
He also warned, however, that before the closure of legal routes to halt the project, representatives of affected indigenous peoples should present an appeal before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Nicaragua waterway to dwarf Panama canal / Nicaragua launches construction of inter-oceanic canal
• ERM : Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA)

Fast foiling ride

Billy and Matthieu enjoyed a fast foiling ride with the Flying Phantom in front of Saint Malo

Insane shift change of French lighthouse keepers

Lighthouse of Kereon  

The lighthouse has been automated in 2004 and insane shift changes no longer take place.

Lighthouse of "la Jument" photo from Jean Guichard 

and the guard Theodore Malgorne, in the storm.

In the picture, lighthouse keeper Théodore Malgorne looks like he’s taking a breath of fresh air. In reality, he’s frightened and waiting for rescuers to take himself and his colleagues away from the dangerous waves and life-threatening situation.
In fact, the keepers had been living in fear of death during the 1989 storm and at one point had taken refuge in the lantern room of the tower.

Waves the night before had smashed through the lower windows of the tower, causing the structure to flood, washing away everything in its path including the television, table, chairs, coffee maker and even the refrigerator.

The keepers in fact were waiting to be rescued by helicopter.

Erected on a stone called "La Jument" , "Ar-Gazec" in breton.

Passage of Fromveur near the island of Ouessant, Sea of Iroise, west Brittany.

When he hears the sound of a helicopter, Théodore steps out of the lighthouse to greet what he thinks is the rescue party.
He realises it’s not who or what he thought; it’s photographer Jean Guichard, who is on-site to capture dramatic images of the waves smashing against the rocks and lighthouse.

 

Seeing what’s about to unfold before him, Jean presses the shutter-release and grabs several pictures before the moment passes.
Théodore Malgorne is initially oblivious to the wave, but quickly realises what’s about to happen and steps back inside, slamming the door shut before the wave engulfs him, and no doubt saving his life as he goes.
In 1990, Jean Guichard won second prize from World Press for his photograph and over the next few years the image became popular in art and print shops.

Storm in Brittany (video Jean-René Kéruzoré)
February 2014
with pictures of La Jument

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Ocean fury  / Pointe du Raz / Petra storm in aerial pictures

God is in these waters

From Narrative by Porter Fox

Equipped with a beat-up old sloop and a boatload of literary inspiration, a Mainer-turned-city-slicker sets sail on an epic 2,000-mile journey to rediscover the coast of his youth.

1. KITTERY

 N43°04.927', W70°43.381' with the Marine GeoGarage

Two silhouettes stood at the end of the town pier.
An orange streetlight burned behind them.
The light reflected off of a silver sedan, the gray siding of Frisbee’s Market, the smooth, black water of the Piscataqua River.

There were boats on the river, their bows turned into the ebbing tide.
The current submerged lobster pots and tipped the red signal buoy off Seavey's Island at forty-five degrees.
In 1820 you could walk across the Piscataqua on the schooners, sloops, barks and brigs moored there.
On this night, there wasn’t a soul on the water.

The silhouettes moved over the weathered planking.
One was wearing a basketball jersey and shorts that reached his shins.
The other had auburn hair and soft brown eyes.
She opened a folding chair and sat beside a cooler.
The boy set the fishing rods down and peered over the railing at a disassembled boat, bobbing in the river twenty feet below.

“What the hell’s that?” he asked.
“Sailboat,” I answered.
“Where’re you taking it?”
“Up the coast.”
“How far?”
“All the way.”

The kid grabbed one of the rods and walked away.
The boat was crisscrossed with guidelines and dock lines, a futile effort to keep the hull from bashing into the pilings every time a wave rolled by.
Tools, sails and broken hardware lay scattered across the deck.
The boat was old, but it was new to me.
My father had built it in 1978 and I discovered it thirty years later.
It looked tiny alongside the pier — a twenty-foot sloop with a cabin so small you couldn’t stand up in it.
It took two weeks to prep and repair the thing.
Even with the mast and boom on, though, it hardly looked ready for the powerful currents and storms in the Gulf of Maine.

The list of broken parts when I started refitting it was inconceivable: two outboard motors, bilge pump, navigation lights, battery, engine mount, furling mechanism, gas tanks, mainsheet, inflatable dinghy, blocks, pulleys, water tank, water pump, three handheld GPS units.

God is in these waters, I wrote in my journal after a half-gallon of motor oil leaked into the storage lockers, bilge and drinking water tank.
He is here and He is unkind.

 A lighthouse near Petit Manan.

That morning when the Kittery harbormaster told me that I couldn’t launch at the town boat ramp, I almost gave up. Some things aren’t meant to be.

But then some are, and you have even less control over them.
So I sat in the parking lot until midnight, when the harbormaster’s truck was gone and the tide was high again.
Then I pitched the boat into the dark water, paddled it to the town pier, topped the tank with town water, plugged the battery charger into the town outlet and used the town crane to step the mast.

It was one in the morning.
The kid baited his hooks while I stabilized the mast with four more stays and trued it as best I could.
Then I crammed the sails and tools into the cabin.
The boat had three bunks, a sink, icebox, water tank and portable head.
There were two portholes on either side of the cabin to let in some light and storage space beneath each bunk.
That morning I’d added a bungee-corded library over the port quarter berth, including Dorothy Simpson’s The Maine Islands, E.B. White’s book of essays One Man’s Meat; Blaise Cendrars’s The Prose of the Trans-Siberian, and The Road to Oxiana, by Robert Byron.
It was strange collection.
Part-fantasy, part-adventure.
But that’s what this trip was — a journey back in time along the coast I grew up on.

Looking back is always different than being there, but I had some gaps to fill in from my childhood. Like why my parents dropped everything in winter of 1975 and moved our family from New York to an island off the northern coast of Maine.
Or how my father reinvented himself from a corporate executive into a boat builder.
I had questions about the seductive power of boats and the ocean, how they sucked my family in and commanded our lives for three decades.
Most of all, I wanted to know how and why all of that fell apart in my father’s middle age, ending in his death at the relatively young age of sixty-two.

My supplies for the trip — a heap of my camping gear, the inflatable dinghy and more broken parts — obscured most of the town dock.
Beyond the pile and the ghost boats pulling at their moorings, an invisible line drawn 250 years ago runs down the middle of the river.
South of the divide, the New Hampshire coastline wraps around New Castle Island, Little Harbor and Odiornes Point, then drops in a near-plumb line to Massachusetts, Connecticut and the eastern seaboard of the United States.
To the north, the frayed edge of Maine wends around Badgers and Seavey islands, in and out of Spruce and Chauncey creeks and up, over and sideways through a maze of rock ledges near Hicks Rocks and Fishing Island before turning north to the craggy shores of Kittery Point and Brave Boat Harbor.

The boundary marks the southern edge of the state of Maine.
To me, it was also a starting line.
Some seven thousand miles north at the Canadian border, around the capes, headlands, narrows and necks of the longest coastline in America, I hoped to find the end.

My father teaching me how to drive our motorboat in 1978.

2. ISLES OF SHOALS

N42°58.754', W70°36.675' with the Marine GeoGarage

A cottony squall line appeared on the horizon as I sailed into my first port, Gosport Harbor in the Isles of Shoals.
There were mare’s tails before the squall, hazy cirrostratus above it.
Two-dozen other boats pointed into the coming gale.
Eight ring-billed gulls hunkered down onshore.
The Isles of Shoals aren’t exactly on my route, but the state line runs through them a few miles east of Portsmouth and I didn’t want to miss anything.
Half the boats around me were in Maine, half in New Hampshire.
I wasn’t sure which state I was in. I knew I was stuck there until the storm passed.

The computerized voice of NOAA crackled on the VHF radio.
The coming storm front packed sixty-mile-per-hour winds and possibly a tornado.
Sunrise: 6:35 a.m. Sunset: 7:13 p.m.
I went below and closed the hatches.
The first wind hit a few minutes later.
Then the waves.
Just before the rain and lightning, the sky glowed pink and the air turned sweet with the smell of lavender.

I ate tortillas and beans in the cabin while the rain came down.
I didn’t have time to shop before pushing off and had food for only one night.
Saucer-shaped clouds drifted overhead and waves crashed into a seawall built between Cedar and Smuttynose islands.
The dark stone beaches of Star Island to the south and Appledore Island to the north complete the harbor and the major islands of the Shoals.

The group is named for shoals of cod, not the rocky shoals that encircle it.
Seaweed-covered and blackened by the ocean, the islands rise up from the tidewater, meet a ring of woodbine and shadbush, then finally give way to windswept grassy fields and stands of spruce running east-west.

After the storm passed, I closed up the boat and motored the dinghy ashore to find food in the Star Island Inn.
The two-hundred-room inn, built in 1873 as the Oceanic Hotel, was now owned by the Unitarian Church.
The clergy bought the island, too, and held retreats and conventions there in the summer.
A young churchgoer assigned to receive guests at the dock took the dinghy’s bowline and invited me ashore.
She was wearing a bright-green bikini and pointed to the snack bar on the ground floor.
If I wanted to see the Vaughn House, she said, I should hustle. It closed in fifteen minutes.

I didn’t know what the Vaughn House was, but the rule was to follow every twist and turn of the coast.
So I walked a winding gravel path past the gift shop and over a small hill to a cedar-shingled shack.
A sign on the door said it was closed for cleaning.
Since no one was around, I walked in anyway.

The ephemera of nineteenth-century poet Celia Thaxter was preserved inside.
Thaxter grew up on the Shoals, where her father was a lighthouse keeper on White Island, then the proprietor of the Appledore House on Appledore Island.
She worked at the inn and entertained writers and artists vacationing there, like Childe Hassam, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
In 1861 Thaxter’s first poem, “Landlocked,” was printed in The Atlantic Monthly.
By the end of the century she’d published nine books of poetry and nonfiction and was one of the most popular writers in New England.

Items from her life sat in glass cases set around the single room: typewriter, pens, manuscripts, hand-painted china, a telescope she used to watched ladies walking the streets of Portsmouth.
A writer’s tools are meant to be used, though, not looked at, and the display was not as interesting to me without words attached.
I returned to the snack bar to buy food and pick up a copy of Thaxter’s memoir, Among the Isles of Shoals, then navigated a throng of eager churchgoers stepping off the ferry and motored back to the boat.
An hour later, propped up on three cushions in the cockpit, I had to stop reading because both of my legs had fallen asleep.

The thing about going back is you never get it right.
It is unreal now; it was unreal then.
I could never find the words to explain the experience of growing up on an island.
Maybe that’s because I left before they came.
Thaxter left the Shoals only a few times and always came back.
Her recollections run like a current through her memoir, never-ending descriptions layered on top of one another, one depiction spilling into the next.
She writes of the people, the water, the old fishermen, the ships…

“…of the sky and sea, the flitting of the coasters to and fro, the visits of the sea-fowl, sunrise and sunset, the changing moon, the northern lights, the constellations that wheel in splendor through the winter night”; of seeds from her garden that come up a different color on the mainland; of brown and swarthy fishermen and the keen glance of seafarers; how “…all the pictures of which I dream were set in this framework of the sea.”

She recalls a storm that shattered the windows of the White Island lightkeeper’s house she grew up in and swept away the covered bridge connecting the house to the light tower; a night that “everything shook so violently from the concussion of the breakers, that dishes on the closet shelves fell to the floor.”
She writes about Samuel Haley, who financed the Smuttynose-Cedar Island seawall with four bars of pirate silver he found under a rock; and the saltworks, windmills and orchards he created. She describes a string of frozen corpses reaching from Haley’s front door to the splintered Spanish schooner, Sagunto, one stormy January night — how she walked among the fourteen shallow graves Haley dug the next day.
The first church on Star Island, she writes, was built from the timbers of wrecked Spanish ships.

The sun swung low over the harbor as I read about an elderly African woman who rowed ten miles to the Shoals in the middle of the night to look for buried treasure, her divining rod reflecting the starlight, garments fluttering in the midnight wind; a fifteen-ton boulder thrown onto the shore of White Island by the waves; layers of fish bones three feet deep on Star Island’s beaches; the “mosaic of stone and shell and sea-wrack” along the shoreline; scraps of boats and masts locals gathered for firewood; “drowned butterflies, beetles and birds; dead boughs of ragged fir trees completely draped with the long, shining ribbon grass that grows in the brackish water near the river mouths.”

The language of the sea comes in word combinations: salt gravel, traprock, song sparrow, skipjack and wolffish.
For no reason, Thaxter writes, Shoalers formed their own vocabulary over the years. A swallow became a “swallick.”
A sparrow was a “sparrick.”
A minister and his congregation called his skinny wife “Laigs” her entire life.
A Norwegian family was christened Carpenter, though they’d never lifted a hammer.
Islanders’ nicknames were markers: Bunker, Shothead, Brag and Squint. Everything had its place on an island, I thought. That was a difference.

I found a tortilla in the cooler and wrapped it around a hunk of cheese that I bought at the snack bar. With the food in one hand, I tilted the book into the dying light with the other.
There were boats on the page now, “obedient, graceful, perfectly beautiful, yielding to the breeze and to billow, yet swayed throughout by a stronger and more imperative law.”
Thaxter writes of the Shoals’ tiny fleet running before a storm — after fishing Jeffrey’s Ledge forty-five miles out to sea — then taking shelter in the lee of Appledore Island.
A half-mile away, in the warmth of the Appledore House, she watched their masts tip almost horizontal to the water until twilight came and they vanished in a purple haze.

The sun was almost gone.
The other boaters had gone below to eat.
The young poetess wrote of rowing with a group of friends at night and swinging her arms through the phosphorescence, “from the fingers playing beneath, fire seemed to stream, emerald sparks clung to the damp draperies.”
Then this: “The eternal sound of the sea on every side has a tendency to wear away the edge of human thought and perception; sharp outlines become blurred and softened like a sketch in charcoal; nothing appeals to the mind with the same distinctness as on the mainland.”

There was fog in the harbor.
The sky swirled silver and gray.
I realized that some of my anxiety about taking this trip came from the fact that I’d moved away from Maine.
And did that mean that I couldn’t write about it?
Mainers are fiercely protective of their history and culture.
They say it takes three generations born in-state to call yourself a native.
We’d come from away.
My mother had been a summer vacationer.
My father pronounced himself a boat builder so quickly, that sometimes our whole presence in Maine seemed superficial.

But Thaxter’s words brought me back.
They conjured images of my own youth in Southwest Harbor — of fisherman’s kids smoking cigarettes outside the Pinball Palace when school let out.
Of the smell of diesel and fish bait on Main Street while weatherworn lobster boats unloaded their catch at the town dock.
I recalled sitting on a ledge in the middle of the ocean before dawn with Crozer, waiting for flights of eider to glide down to our decoys.
The island and my memory of it were my home more than anywhere else, I realized.

I turned on the VHF.
There were more thunderstorms tracking across the mainland.
It would blow tomorrow too, the voice said.
A boat circled Gosport Harbor.
I recognized its low-slung lines, the open cockpit, tan bimini collapsed on the bow.
The cherry console and teak decking were familiar — auburn and gold.
The boat was a Somes Sound 26, a replica of a Newport launch, twenty-six feet long with a 240 horsepower Chrysler inboard engine.
My father built it. It was one of seven motorboats he ever built.
The rest were all sailboats.

The timing, chance and message — if there was one — were overwhelming.
The scene seemed staged, like it was lifted from one of my dreams.
I sat motionless and watched the boat head west toward Portsmouth.
It picked up speed and a thick, white wake rolled off the stern.

I opened Thaxter’s book again.
The words were black splotches on the page.
I couldn’t think of anything.
I flipped to a dog-eared passage I’d read a half-dozen times.

Pleasanter still to think of some slender girl at twilight lingering with reluctant feet and wistful eyes that search the dusky sea for a returning sailor whose glimmer was sweeter than moonlight or starlight to her sight—lingering still, though her mother calls within and the dew falls with the falling night. She walked these shores most of her life, but especially in her young life. And it’s in your young life where the living begins and where it was strongest. And you will always go back to that until you were old and weak as a child and happy that you have no care in the world again.

US NOAA update in the Marine GeoGarage

As our public viewer is not yet available
(currently under construction, upgrading to a new viewer
as Google Maps API v2 is officially no more supported),
this info is primarily intended to our universal mobile application users
(Marine US iPhone-iPad on the Apple Store &
Weather 4D Android -App-in- on the PlayStore)
and also to our B2B customers which use our nautical charts layers
in their own webmapping applications through our GeoGarage API. 

 NOAA raster chart coverage

14 charts have been updated in the Marine GeoGarage

(NOAA update February 2015, released February 18, 2015)

• 11524 ed54 Charleston Harbor
• 11537 ed40 Cape Fear River Cape Fear to Wilmington
• 12222 ed55 Chesapeake Bay Cape Charles to Norfolk Harbor
• 12325 ed6 Navesink And Shrewsbury Rivers
• 12333 ed38 Kill Van Kull and Northern Part of Arthur Kill (Inset)
• 12402 ed13 New York Lower Bay Northern part
• 14803 ed28 Six Miles south of Stony Point to Port Bay;North Pond;Little Sodus Bay
• 16380 ed16 Pribilof Islands
• 16381 ed10 St. George Island. Pribilof Islands
• 16382 ed12 St. Paul Island. Pribilof Islands
• 16432 ed12 Massacre Bay
• 16463 ed8 Kanaga Pass and approaches
• 16478 ed11 Tagalak Island to Great Sitkin Island;Sand Bay-Northeast Cove
• 16486 ed8 Atka Island. western part

Today 1026 NOAA raster charts (2168 including sub-charts) are included in the Marine GeoGarage viewer (see PDFs files)


How do you know if you need a new nautical chart?
See the changes in new chart editions.
NOAA chart dates of recent Print on Demand editions

Note : NOAA updates their nautical charts with corrections published in:

• U.S. Coast Guard Local Notices to Mariners (LNMs),
• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Notices to Mariners (NMs), and
• Canadian Coast Guard Notices to Mariners (CNMs)

While information provided by this Web site is intended to provide updated nautical charts, it must not be used as a substitute for the United States Coast Guard, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or Canadian Coast Guard Notice to Mariner publications

Please visit the NOAA's chart update service for more info or the online chart catalog