...but there's no requirement that they actually LOOK at them... (grin)

All good points, obviously ECS alone works fine for yourself, and many others... I'm simply pointing out what works best for me, particularly when I'm sailing alone and preoccupied with other stuff as well, and fatigue might come into play. My example from Nova Scotia posted below seems a classic case where I might have missed a dangerous hazard I was approaching at the end of a trying passage, the end nearly in sight, where I might have made the same mistake made aboard VESTAS, and failed to fly the route at a high enough zoom to reveal the rock that is very clearly shown on a far smaller scale paper chart...

However, I'm not so sure that the VESTAS grounding "had nothing to do with charts... or the zoom level"... How else would they have known about the hazard, if not by zooming in sufficiently to be able to see it? (Or, by looking at British Admiralty 4072 ? (grin)) Both the navigator and the skipper admitted their mistake in the conference call the other day: "'At the end of the day we didn’t look at the chart and we didn’t zoom in enough."

Obviously, these guys made a colossal mistake... Wouter Verbraak is one of the most accomplished offshore race navigators in the world today, nobody makes it aboard a VOR raceboat who isn't. If a guy like HIM, and a skipper like Chris Nicholson with 2 previous VORs under his belt can make such an error, I have to admit someone like myself is certainly capable of doing so, no? I simply think being able to refer to paper, in addition to navigating electronically, is the best safeguard against my doing so... Again, others' mileage may vary...

You raise an interesting point, however, re how closely these guys are paying attention to the tracks of their competition... They all have AIS, and that has been one of the reasons why the fleet has remained so closely packed in this edition of the VOR, and with this being a Points Scored rather than a Total Elapsed Time race overall, it's become more of a Match Race among the fleet... One thing that's always bothered me about this incident, if we are to believe all these boats are monitoring each other's tracks as is being claimed... We know that at least 2 other boats - ALVIMEDICA and SCA - were in pretty close proximity, and in effect 'racing against' VESTAS as they approached that reef... So, why did not either of THEM hail VESTAS if they knew they were standing into danger, and ask them "Hey, you guys know about that reef up ahead, right?"

If they indeed were following VESTAS' track at the time, either of the 2 possibilities why they failed to alert them are very troubling... Either they were not aware of the danger ahead themselves, or... ?