Custom NOAA Charts for Free

One of my personal dreams has been to have a free tool for creating custom NOAA Charts for sea kayaking. In the past, I spent weeks downloading charts, converting charts to an image file, editing them for printing and then printing a custom chart. Now you can bypass that by using NOAA’s Custom Chart tool.

The tool itself is easy to use. I figured it out in a few minutes and had a custom chart of my home port printed shortly after that. If you want to watch a video, NOAA offers a tutorial video on how to make a custom chart.

How To Make the Charts

The basics of creating one follow these steps:

1. Click on the Layer Settings Icon (it looks like a stack of papers with a gear).
2. Pick your criteria. I just leave everything at the default settings. The only one that you may want to change is the Compass Rose. If you turn it off, you’ll get a smaller directional arrow instead of a big compass rose.
3. Then go to the “Chart Settings” icon, which is the next one to the right. Here you can name your chart, set the scale, pick a paper size and select landscape or portrait. You can also select the depth units and customize depth zones.
4. After doing that, click Create New Chart.
5. Click on the center of where you want your custom chart.
6. A green box will show up.
7. Click the Move Chart button to move it around as needed.
8. Then go to the next icon, which is the Export Functions.
9. Click the chart you made in the Chart Queue to select it.
10. Click the Export Selected Charts button.
11. Wait for it to generate and then click view. A pdf that you can print will open up. When printing, make sure that your printer doesn’t Scale to Fit, because that will change the scale.

There’s also a Chart Catalog feature if you plan on reprinting your charts in the future. You can also delete your custom NOAA charts by selecting them on the Export Functions tab and selecting “Delete Selected Charts.” This helps keep the queue clean as you design multiple charts.

Hint: For scale, there are 72913.4 inches in a nautical mile.

Downsides of the Current Custom NOAA Charts Tool

Right now, you can’t specify where you want a compass rose and if your custom extent doesn’t include one there won’t be a compass rose on your chart. That’s not a big deal as there are latitude and longitude lines. The biggest downside is you won’t know variation (declination). You’ll need to either find a nearby compass rose on the chart setting screen or by running an internet search for that area. In the future, NOAA will enhance the generator by allowing you to add compass roses on the custom NOAA charts.

The other downside is you can’t select a custom paper size. I have a printer that will make A3+ (13 x 19 inches), but that isn’t an option.

I do wish you could export image files. You can do this in Adobe Acrobat’s paid plan or in Photoshop if you have that plan. You can do this in other programs, too, but it’s a bit of a pain that the NOAA tool doesn’t do this natively.

Get Your Charts

I’m really excited about this tool and can’t wait to put it to use. After all the time I spent making custom charts, it’s hard to believe that this tool now exists.

If you want to learn more about navigation, I’ve written about canoe and kayak navigation extensively. I used to write a navigation column for Ocean Paddler Magazine. Although it might be hard to find back issues now.