NOAA Charts are a bit of a moving target so the following text will change over time. At the publishing of this website (March 2026) this is where we are at:

By December of 2024 NOAA had cancelled all traditional paper charts and switched everybody over to a Custom Chart, or make as you go web application, where Electronic Chart Data is converted into PDF form for printing.

At Frugal Navigator, we initially thought that we would simply replicate the cancelled traditional paper charts on this new web app. We discovered however, in 2025, that NOAA's process of rescheming or changing usage band scales was making that impossible. Where most of the old "approach" charts were 1:80,000 scale, they are now mainly 1:45,000 scale. We now only get about half of what we were accustomed to printing on the same sheet of paper.

The Custom Chart web app is new and has a few bugs. One problem is that adjacent ATONS have a tendency, at the reschemed scale to overprint each other. This happens, too, with bridge and cable heights. We have found that we need to enlarge the reschemed tiles in order to get these ATONS to stand apart.

The strategy at Frugal Navigator, due to these issues, is to create a catalog of larger scale charts (less area per chart) that accounts for the new scale and the existing bugs. If you are looking for charts in a particular area and don't see anything of greater scale than 1:45,000 you will know that either Frugal Navigator has not worked in that area yet or, maybe, the NOAA rescheming is still in process.

Until we have a chance to build and post new charts to this website, we are recommending that mariners give the NOAA Custom Chart Tool a try. There is no better chart, we are convinced, than the chart designed by the mariner him or herself. Besides that, making charts is fun and gratifying. You really should try it.

Once you've created a chart, you can upload it to Frugal Navigator for printing with our all our available nautical chart papers (including the inexpensive classroom paper).

If you are willing to try and make your own charts, be aware that there are nuances and you'll need to develop a new skill. We suggest you take an inexpensive online class from Shearwater University, if you decide to jump into custom chart making. We have information about Shearwater University, the NOAA Custom Chart Tool and a process to upload and print them all on this page: NOAA Custom Chart Printing

All papers used by Frugal Navigator are coated and, to some extent, water resistant. Tuff Map paper is just that. It is nearly indestructible. We experimented with Tuff Map and kept a map outside, unfolded, for a year of sun, rain, and snow. It is still readable and ready for use. In some cases, where we can, we offer Classroom Paper. As the name implies, they are lightweight with little coating and not expected to survive any kind of weather. We like this paper since it allows us to bring the price way down for applications where that matters. We are unable to use this material for Official NOAA charts since anything we printed on the back would show through the front. We suggest that you protect all maps and experiment with our various papers to see what works best for you.

Yes we sell only acid free paper for use in framing or other artistic applications. The paper we use in our Decor department is fairly heavy. If you are doing a project that requires a lot of fine folding, please contact us since the default paper for these maps does not fold as sharply as you will want.

We send things out Monday through Friday and strive to ship your order as quickly as possible. Normally that means within 24 hours from when the order is placed. Summer can be busy and unforeseen equipment issues can pop up when we are working them so hard. This is rare but your adventure is important so we suggest ordering early. Another thing to note: We at Frugal Navigator are adventurers just like you and, on occasion, we will want to get out ourselves. We try to restrict this to our slower seasons but if you see a yellow banner at the top of each web page warning of a delay, we won't be able to ship until the posted date. If you do see a yellow banner, and place an order, however, we will reward your patience and understanding with a 20% discount. If you don't see that yellow banner, your order will ship under normal conditions.

We are all very fortunate to be able to take advantage of inexpensive medial mail for maps. Be aware, though, that this is a very slow method of shipping. In checkout where USPS is calculating the cost of shipping, they always estimate 2 to 8 days but we have seen them take as long as 3 weeks. If you use media mail please allow for the uncertainty of this service.

On our old website, we offered free shipping for one map folded and multiple maps rolled. We had to change this for a variety of reasons. We wanted to introduce a cheaper "Classroom" paper that might help more people get the map they need and those maps (some below $2) cost more to ship than we collect for the sale. In addition, over the last five years, shipping costs seem to have doubled. USPS has put a surcharge on anything long (like a map tube) and shipping supplies like envelopes and tubes have gone up substantially. We miss the free shipping as I am sure you do but it just doesn't work these days. We've tried to mitigate this by designing less expensive nautical charts and making folding standardized and more convenient. That said, if you meet a $60 order threshold, we calculate that we can, happily, make shipping free again. Thank you for your understanding.

On our old website, we had about 30,000 maps. We used hotspots or marker pins with links attached to help customers navigate from Index to Catalog to Maps. This was not ideal but it was the best we could do with the technology we had at the time.

Flash forward to 2026 and we decided to expand the selection on our new website. We now have just under 70,000 maps for sale and the most efficient way we have found to find them quickly is not to have hundreds indexes and catalogs but use an AI search mechanism to take you directly to the most detailed map. Once you land on that map, you will find buttons and hotspots (pulsing plus signs) to navigate to other maps in that area. The idea was that once AI has helped you parachute into the part of the world you want to explore, you can use our normal website navigation to move around. In this way, you can circle the globe, if you want, without going back to AI. We wanted shopping for maps to give you a similar experience, an explorative sense, as you enjoy from your boat. Fingers crossed that this works for everybody.

Some of you probably like AI and others don't. We are neutral on this but found it to be most practical with such a large inventory. If you have been using a chatbot and love to talk boating, you might have fun visiting with Finn, in our quirky and imaginary bar called the Crowsnest. Finn was set up just for fun. He likes to talk boating and for those of you that enjoy that too...we hope you like it. If you are in a hurry to get your map and get out, you can cut out the Finn small talk. Go directly to the Gazetteer which is just a basic geographic search form. You can enter, there, coordinates, names of bays, points, beaches, mountains, etc. We can't yet search for hiking trails but you can find them by entering the coordinates of the trailhead. Many guide books and websites have this information.

Since we've built the infrastructure to search for coordinates, we plan to open a bit of a customer wiki where folks can upload pictures and leave comments. We'll then associate these posts with the appropriate map on our system. This will allow each of us to display the beauty of our adventure or even point out practical tips like missing creek crossings, nice anchorages in a Northwest Wind, etc. Look for this soon.

Yes, you can save yourself from typing search requests by clicking the microphone in the chat field. Please note that your voice will be transcribed as if it were a text and you'll need to still use the arrow in the chat field to send the message. Someday soon, we hope to have our chatbots respond by voice but we are not quite there yet. Stay tuned.

When you shop for clothes on a typical website, you will often see a gallery of like items underneath the item you are looking at. This is how the typical e commerce store is structured. If you are looking at tan pants, scroll down the page and you'll like see green ones and blue ones or, possibly, a black pair. This is sort of the same structure that we have used for our website too.

What we have tried to do is use the chart itself as a catalog. At the top of the product page, you will see the chart without anything to distract you from exploring the image. If you scroll down the page, you will see another copy of that chart but covered with pulsating plus signs. (If you don't see these, you have reached the end of the line and you are likely looking at the largest scale we have for that area. Here you can use the blue button to go back to the broader overview and move laterally).

Now, when you click on a pulsating plus sign, you might expect that you will be taken to another page but that is not how it works. This hotspot might not take you where you want to go so just like the tan pants with the multi-color gallery below it, the pulsating buttons are changing the map in that gallery below (or to the right if you are on a large desktop monitor). As you change the gallery by looking at the thumbnail of the chart you triggered, decide if that is the chart you want to explore. If it is, click on that chart thumbnail and you will go to its product page where this navigation structure repeats.

Note that we are limited, by storage capacity, so some charts (especially in Alaska where we sell fewer) will not have hotspots to change the gallery but will look exactly like the Pants model described above.

This is a good question and it depends on the type of map: There are thousands and thousands of USGS maps on our website so you are limited to Lizzie or the Gazetteer. We are working to put trail maps onto our website and, since there will be fewer, you will also be able to use the magnifying glass icon in the header of each page.

For current nautical charts from NOAA and NGA, you have several choices. If you like to let your fingers explore, choose "Links to Nautical Charts in the drop-down menu. If you want to have a fun conversation, consider talking to Finn in the imaginary Crowsnest Bar. If you are in a hurry, using the Gazetteer is the way to go. The least effective way to find a chart is the old school magnifying glass icon at the top of the page. Try it, it might work, but it is not as rich of a database of places as the chatbots have access to.

For those of you who are looking for a chart to frame for the living room wall (or garage if you have strict limitations) you can search any of the old NOAA chart numbers using the old fashioned magnifying glass icon at the top of the page but clicking the "Decor" menu and visiting Gale's gallery is the most efficient method. She knows all about framing, wall paper, etc. It might be helpful to get to know her and you won't need a chart number. You can give her a geographic feature to search or even the lat/lon of your beach house. If you are in a hurry or want access to all of our maps for a certain area, you can search using the Gazetteer.

Happy Searching Everybody! Map Ahoy!

Thank you for asking. This is a bit of a sore spot for map dealers. You see, paper maps are quite big relative to a PC Monitor and even bigger relative to a smart phone screen.

Web designers have to balance a couple important demands when creating map images to put on a website. If we keep them low resolution as most websites use, our customers can't see the details of a large intricate map. If we create high resolution images so our customers can read everything perfectly, they will load slowly and Google will penalize us for it. If Google thinks our page is too slow, they will give us a lower rank and you might not find us or our maps.

We love maps and want to use the highest resolution possible when creating the images for our website. In practice, though, we have to stick with medium-high resolution so that it will load as fast as practical, striking a balance between your willingness to wait for that load and your ability to see everything clearly. Is that clear? Blurry?

It might help knowing, here, that the files used for web products and the files used on, say, the gps map of your phone are different. Some of us, like me, use gps but also like having a big picture broad view map for navigating. In the field we all strike a similar compromise between navigating from a small screen (narrow context area) and a large beautiful map that might be inconvenient in a wind or less than ideal weather. The issue to note here is that typical web images use pixel based images and not the vector based images of an electronic map. When you receive and use our maps, they will be probably more readable than your gps screen but on the web, we simply have to deal with the loading time/resolution compromise.

We hope the balance we've chosen works for most of you, our customers, but we are always open to feedback so please send an email if you have strong feelings about this or some technical advise that somehow went over our tiny little heads here a Frugal Navigator.