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Dec 22 2024
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Weekly quiz: Nautical chart of St. Paul island

By Nicolas

This week in the Vendée Globe, Antoine Cornic anchored off St-Paul Island to repair his broken mainsail track ⛓️‍💥

To put the pictures shared by the TAAF into context, we looked up the SHOM nautical chart for this particular anchorage.

Questions

We spotted some arrows (circled in red 🔴). What do they mean?

Now, we’ve got some more questions for you today. It’s our Christmas present! 🎁

Within the crater, we also spotted several symbols, circled in green 🟢. What are they?

There’s also a kind of small cloud, in the center of the image, highlighted in blue 🔵. Here again, what does it represent?

SHOM chart 7170 – Saint Paul and Amsterdam Islands

And bonus question

If you’re in any doubt about what you’re seeing on a nautical chart, to find out for sure, which resource should you refer to? 📙

👉 Reply on one of our social media below. We’ll post the solution right here next Sunday!

PS: Don’t you think this place is crazy? We’d love to be able to dinghy into that crater! 🚣

Solutions

Thank you all for taking part in this quiz.

As many of you have correctly pointed out, the arrows circled in 🔴 show the direction of the tidal currents : ebbing stream for the simple arrow, and flood stream for the arrow with feathers on a single side (feathers on both sides would have depicted a more permanent, non-tidal current).

The 🟢 symbols are some kind of spring in the seabed. Most likely warm water since it’s inside a volcanic crater, but that’s not the topic here.

Finally, the cloud-like symbol highlighted in 🔵 warns that there may be breakers in the area, no doubt due to the very shallow threshold. Approaching the entrance thus would require very good, calm conditions and a lot of caution.

As for the bonus question

If in doubt on what symbols represent on a nautical chart, International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) publication INT 1 is the standard on symbols and abbreviations used on nautical charts.

Some countries publish it with the following national reference:

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