Boating here means holding two charts in your head. Outside the banks is open ocean, with the capes standing well out into it at Hatteras and Lookout. Inside, the route is a thread that runs behind the beach through sounds and dredged cuts, and the inlets that join the two are the part nobody runs casually. What makes this coast its own problem is that very little of the hazard is fixed. The bottom is sand, it rearranges itself between surveys, and the inlets are where that shows up first.
The pack Helm builds for the Carolinas and the Outer Banks starts from 268 official NOAA ENC cells, the third highest cell count of the eighteen US regions Helm packs. Inside them are 72,982 individual soundings and 8,701 charted depth areas, with 8,165 depth contours drawn across those. On the hazard side there are 720 charted wrecks and 2,903 charted obstructions, along with 897 dredged areas. The download is 29 MB.
NOAA publishes its electronic charts as cells, and the larger the scale a piece of water is drawn at, the more cells it takes to cover it. This region is built from 268 of them. Only two of the eighteen US regions Helm packs carry more.
The sounding count sits elsewhere in the table. 72,982 soundings puts the Carolinas fourteenth of the eighteen, with 8,701 depth areas and 8,165 contours drawn across them. Read together, a high cell count next to a middling sounding count describes what this coast actually is: navigable water that runs long and narrow and has been cut into many large scale charts along its length, rather than one broad body drawn at one scale. The practical version of that is the part you already know. You are almost never in the middle of anything here. You are in a channel, a slough or an inlet approach, and the chart is drawn accordingly.
| In the chart pack | Count |
|---|---|
| NOAA ENC cells | 268 |
| Charted soundings | 72,982 |
| Depth areas | 8,701 |
| Depth contours | 8,165 |
| Lateral buoys | 724 |
| Lateral beacons | 1,942 |
| Charted lights | 1,924 |
| Anchorage areas | 5 |
| Bridges | 679 |
| Overhead cables | 276 |
| Dredged areas | 897 |
| Charted wrecks | 720 |
| Charted obstructions | 2,903 |
| Underwater rocks | 100 |
| Restricted areas | 406 |
| NOAA tide prediction stations | 142 |
Counted from the Helm chart pack for Carolinas & Outer Banks, built from official NOAA electronic navigational charts. The pack downloads at about 29 MB.
Count the aids and the region tells you how it gets navigated. There are 1,942 lateral beacons against 724 lateral buoys, and the beacon figure is sixth of the eighteen regions. A beacon is driven into the bottom. It stays where the chart put it and carries a daymark you can pick up at distance. A buoy floats on a chain and answers to weather.
Close to three fixed marks for every floating one is what running the inside route looks like in practice. You work structure to structure rather than picking a line across open water, and the 1,924 charted lights mean the same marks are still there after dark.
The 27 safe water marks deserve their own line. A safe water mark has navigable water all around it and sits at the seaward end of a channel, which on this coast means an inlet approach: you find the mark offshore, then run in from it. Twenty seven of them is fifth of the eighteen regions, which tracks with how many places this coast lets you come in off the ocean.
Overhead, the pack holds 679 bridges and 276 charted cable crossings. Air draft is a live planning number on the inside route, because a fixed span does not negotiate and a cable crossing carries a clearance figure of its own.
The pack contains 100 charted underwater rocks. It contains 720 charted wrecks and 2,903 charted obstructions. That imbalance is the most useful thing in the hazard counts, because it says the thing you are avoiding is mostly not geology. A rock coast hands you hazards that will sit in the same place for the rest of your life. This one hands you a soft bottom that moves and a great deal of iron resting on top of it.
Wrecks in that quantity change how the offshore half of the region reads. 720 points where the bottom comes up abruptly is a hazard list to one skipper and a set of marks to another, and what separates the two readings is draft and intent. Either way you want them drawn before you leave the dock, not fetched from a tower you cannot hear from twenty miles out.
Because the bottom is sand, the date on a sounding matters more here than the value does. Two charted depths that read the same are different promises when one came off a recent channel survey and the other came off a survey of a bar that has moved since. Helm puts the date next to the number instead of flattening the two together.
897 of the charted areas in this region are dredged. The chart states a depth for each one, and across all 897 that stated depth has a median of 3.6 m, close to 11.8 feet. The deepest runs to 16.2 m, about 53 feet. Some carry 0.0, which in a chart field is the absence of a figure rather than the absence of water.
Half the dredged areas in the Carolinas are charted at 3.6 m or less. That is the number to carry into a departure decision, because it sets how much of the day's range you are spending to make a passage comfortable instead of tight, and it is why the hour you leave is a real choice here rather than a convenience.
Charted anchorage areas are a different matter. There are five in the whole region, fewer than in any other region Helm packs. Anchoring in the Carolinas is a question of reading depth areas and contours off the waterway and picking a creek that still holds water at the bottom of the tide, not of finding a designated box. Two things narrow the choice and both are drawn in the pack: 406 restricted areas, and 11 marine farming areas sitting in water that looks open at small scale.
142 NOAA tide prediction stations fall inside this region. That is dense for one stretch of coast, and the geography is the reason. Where the ocean reaches the inside water through inlets and then works its way up long marsh creeks, the tide at the inlet and the tide well behind it differ in range and in timing. A single station would not describe both ends of that.
The station list shows the granularity plainly. Beaufort carries two of its own, one at the Duke Marine Lab and one on Taylor Creek. Carr Creek has a station a mile above its entrance. The whole list runs from open ocean down to individual docks:
What the density buys you is that the tide figure you read comes from a station near where you are standing rather than from the nearest large harbor. On a coast where creek and inlet run an hour or more apart, that is the difference between a prediction you can use and one you have to adjust in your head.
These counts describe what the chart pack carries, not the state of the water today. Charted data ages, channels shoal and marks move. Keep a lookout and verify locally.
Yes. The Carolinas and Outer Banks pack carries 720 charted wrecks and 2,903 charted obstructions, and they come down inside the 29 MB download rather than being fetched when you are already out there. Which of them are hazards and which are marks depends on your draft and what you went out for.
Probably. 142 NOAA tide prediction stations fall inside this region, and many of them are creek and dock stations rather than harbor stations: Allston Creek, Bull Creek entrance, Carr Creek a mile above its entrance, Bennet's Dock at Pawleys Island Creek. Beaufort alone carries two, at the Duke Marine Lab and on Taylor Creek.
The pack holds 897 dredged areas. The depth stated on the chart for them has a median of 3.6 m, about 11.8 feet, and reaches 16.2 m at the deepest, about 53 feet. A few carry no stated value at all. Helm shows the area's own figure against the draft you entered, with the date that measurement was taken, rather than an average for the waterway.
Helm Boating