We primarily use chartplotter these days (or rather chartplotters, since we seem to have ended up with three of them on board). We use paper for backup, but frankly, when you have already paid for the electronic charts, it is frustrating to have to pay a second time for the papers charts. We have compromised, generally, by buying a large scale chart that would get us into the harbor entrance in a pinch, and relying on printouts of the electronic charts, or the chartlets in the cruising guides ("Do NOT use for navigation") for the chance we would have to enter a harbor without the chartplotter. As you may know, the electronic charts and the official charts are of limited use for many harbors in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, where the chartlets in the cruising guides may actually be the only small scale charts available.

A small, self-contained chartplotter doesn't use much power. On passage, we usually keep a log of GPS lat long position every hour or two to use as a starting point if we lose all the GPSs, and plot our position on the large scale chart once a day.

We use a laptop for weatherfaxes and as a backup display for our AIS. This year I replaced the ancient HP laptop that was running Windows 95 (boots right up, never crashes, wish I could go back to it) with a cheap netbook that also has a direct 12v power plug available for it. It's small enough to slip into a ziplock bag in rough weather, and at $250, I won't be heartbroken if it dies when a wave sloshes through the companionway. And it only draws about 25w -- a lot more than the chartplotter, but a lot less than a laptop.

--Karl S/V Mabel Rose