E-Mail Newsletter from the National Coop Charting Committee
July 2009

From R/C HORST:
Greetings, y'all!

With the 2009/2010 cooperative charting reporting year in its third month, things are looking promising. So far, over 160 participants submitted reports with 60 of them already on the Honor Roll. All of them come from 13 squadrons in 14 districts.

My question to all committee members and district chairpersons: What are your plans to get most, if not all of the others active? In my experience, a couple of phone calls or face to face meetings at district and national meetings go a long way to solve problems or get misconceptions clarified. If you don’t believe me, ask Stf/C Jim for his experiences.

Several weeks ago I sent out an email to all committee members, in it I was asking for your attendance plans at the G/B Meeting in Kansas City. Thank you to the ones who replied; but what about the rest of you?

Speaking about the G/B Meeting, we will have Mr. Patrick Kline give a short presentation about the USACE program. Patrick is a geographer at the USACE Kansas City District. Since the meeting is well away from any coastline, I am planning to give a short presentation about what inland squadrons near USACE waterways and lakes can do in cooperative charting right now.

The 2009 update of the Cooperative Charting Manual is available for download in CCWeb and also at our webpage in the USPS website. It contains some updates and new items. If you haven’t done so already, please notify your respective district chairmen about it. There was a lot of work done to make it as correct as possible, but if you find any errors, typos, etc, please let me know.

Last but not least, there are presently about 40 reports hanging in the ‘Modify Existing Reports’ queue. Some of them dating back to the beginning of March, others are fairly recent. Some of them have been returned for corrections and others might just be ‘orphan’ reports. Please check your assigned districts once monthly for them and contact the observer and district chairman to either forward or delete them. Remind them that reports need to be submitted in a timely manner.

Thank you and I hope to see you in Kansas City,

Horst

From Stf/C Jim:

As mentioned by Horst, our new Coop Charting Manual is now available. Many hours were spent proof-reading this manual to insure everything was correct. Unfortunately inclusion of all the new checklists was missed. The only one included is for Nautical Reports. In order to address this over sight I will email to anyone who wants the complete set of lists separately. Just send me an email requesting them and I will send the entire folder back to you.

While speaking of checklists, I want to remind everyone this is our first attempt at using them. As such there may be issues that come up that were not anticipated. Please be patient if your report is returned with comments not covered in the checklists. Also please remember that the checklists address the “minimum” information to be included.

Please do not hesitate to provide us with feedback on these checklists in order to provide us better quality control.

In April Horst and I have the opportunity to attend the District 8 Conference to present information on the Coop Charting program. We also learned at this conference there are many misconceptions regarding the program. The misconceptions went the whole realm from the program is “dead with no one participating” all the way to “no one really cares what we do”. These types of misconceptions are very damaging to getting people to participate in the program.

We need to remind everyone the program is not “dead” and that our work is very much appreciated and used by NOAA. While you may not see the direct results of your efforts it is important to remember the information being submitted is being used and is appreciated.

So the point is. If you hear any complaints or rumors about the Coop Charting program please contact a National Committee member and we will attempt to resolve the issue. As I have said in the past, if we do not know something we cannot fix it.

Jim

From Stf/C John:

CCWeb Depth Surveys
Depth surveys are sort of the Advanced Grades of co-operative charting. They can be more rewarding and gain you more credits than other types of corrections, but they are harder to do correctly and take a lot more time.

The first thing you need to do, is to carefully read and follow the “NOS Instructions for Depth Wiz Surveys” which can be found in the NOS Material section of the Training, SOP & Reference hyperlink of your CCWeb Home Page. Pay particular attention to the requirements on page 11. There is also a lot of good information in the Co-Operative Charting Manual and in the other documents in Training, SOP & Reference. Here are some tips to get you started.

Equipment
  • Almost any boat can be used as long as it is stable and suitable for the waters surveyed.
  • You need a WAAS enabled GPS and a depth sounder that reads in tenths of feet. They should both have NMEA communication ability so that when you hook the data out wire from the sounder to the data in wire of the GPS, it records the depth each time a track point is taken.
  • A sounding pole or line is required in order to determine your transducer correction.
Planning
  • Study the chart for the area you plan to cruise and pick out an area to survey that meets the requirements in the NOS instructions.
  • Check the tides for the day of your survey. You want to do it on either a rising or falling tide but not before and after a high or low.
  • If your cruise area is not in your home waters, you need to allow time enough to make the survey, run the Depth Wiz report and possibly make a resurvey of any suspect areas. If you wait to run Depth Wiz until you get home, you may find you have to make another trip to the area for a resurvey because of some shoal spots in your report.
  • Plot your survey route and upload it to your GPS. It is much easier to follow a GPS route than to try to steer a grid pattern by eye.

Surveying
  • Determine your transducer correction by cruising by a piling or other fixed object several times at your survey speed and noting the sounder reading each time. Compare the average of those readings with the actual depth as determined by your sounding pole or line. It is best not to adjust your sounder so that the correction is zero but, if you do, be sure to state that in the notes section of the Depth Wiz file so that the cartographer will know that you have actually corrected for the transducer location.
  • Take a GPS reading at a known location and plot it for a confidence check.
  • Note your GPS performance value and number of satellites at the beginning and end of the run.
  • Clear out your GPS track log and set it to record on distance and to stop when full.
  • Start your run, follow your track and let your depth sounder and GPS do all the work.
Instructions for downloading your information and preparing the Depth Wiz report are given in the Training, SOP & Reference section of CCWeb. I’ll share some tips with you on these areas in a future news letter.

Happy Charting!

Stf/C John J. Rodgers, SN

Return