Do you correct your Almanac? I have to confess that, until now, I haven't done so very conscientiously. I always ordered the correction supplements, in the days when they came by post, and since they have been available online I have dutifully registered, downloaded and printed them.
But instead of religiously sticking them in the Almanac, line by line, on the appropriate pages, I have merely put them in a plastic folder in the chart table, and checked occasionally to see whether there was anything I really ought to know about an unfamiliar cruising destination.
This year it has been different. It started with the change in the Coastguard weather forecast broadcasts, which came into force after the Almanac was printed. As these are pages I refer to a lot, over the course of a year's cruising, I thought I had better put in the three completely new pages supplied, detailing changes in the areas covered as well as the times and content of the broadcasts.
It didn't matter that I made a bit of a clumsy mess of it (I defy anybody to put new pages in completely neatly and seamlessly, unless you have the looseleaf edition, of course.) It actually serves as a convenient bookmark.
But then, of course, having done that, I started to look at the rest of the corrections, with a view to what we actually needed from them. And as our sailing plans for 2007 will cover areas from south west Ireland to the Netherlands, the answer was: quite a lot.
Sometimes it's just a case of amending or adding light characteristics for a waypoint. Sometimes it's a substantial cut and paste job. I can of course, safely ignore new chartlets for Spain and Gibraltar - but not passage information for Wales and the Bristol Channel, because we might just be looking for ports of refuge there if it all went horribly wrong on the Fastnet.
February's corrections included a new chartlet for the Hamble, and March's for Plymouth - both relatively unfamiliar and on this year's itinerary, so they have to go in. Just as well to know about the new leading lights for Queen Anne's Battery, where we are due to stop after the Fastnet, and may well be arriving in the dark.
And it's as well to know too, about the latest wind farm developments off the Dutch Coast, as we'll be heading that way on the North Sea race, and with luck, later in the year on a cruising holiday.
The problem is, it's not just a case of correcting the Almanac, which takes long enough. You then have to start transferring the details to the relevant charts. And then you look at the date on the bottom of the charts and realise just how old they are, and how long it is since you last did any corrections….
What began as an evening's project is rapidly becoming something of an epic. One advantage of electronic charts is that, providing you update them once a year (it might seem expensive, but it's a bargain, compared with the cost of renewing all the paper ones in the areas they cover) they are never very far out of date.
You are, of course, still supposed to keep your eye on those Notices to Mariners, and keep a note of relevant changes. You can't, of course, correct things directly on an electronic chart, although you can move a waypoint, for example, to show where something has altered.
And the Almanac updates are a big help because they include the information from those Notices to Mariners.
To download updates to Reeds Nautical Almanacs (available monthly until July) go to www.reedsalmanac.co.uk/updates
If you register with the site, you will be sent an e-mail reminder when new updates are available.
