The New Jersey Shore is two navigation problems sharing one chart. Outside the beach you are on open ocean, the ground is the part of the chart that is really talking to you, and the question that decides the day is which inlet you can still use to get back in. Inside, behind the barrier beaches, the water is thin, your line is fixed by dredged cuts and by bridges, and the chart is talking about clearance and about current instead. The pack reaches west to 75.6 degrees and north to 40.6, so the river and bay water on the back side of the state comes down in the same file as Atlantic City and Barnegat Inlet.
Helm builds the region from 146 official NOAA ENC cells. Inside the pack are 75,848 individual soundings, 13,830 depth contours and 13,088 charted depth areas, together with 1,763 wrecks, 3,066 obstructions, 1,306 bridges, 924 dredged areas and 1,399 lateral buoys. Tide predictions come from 216 NOAA stations inside the same box. The download is 13 MB, and once it is on the phone it works with no signal.
Helm builds eighteen US regions through the same pipeline, so the counts can be set against each other. The New Jersey Shore is middle of the table on raw sounding volume and near the top of it on almost everything a person put in the water.
The last line is the useful one. Rock is the hazard class where this coast ranks low, while wrecks, bridges, buoys and dredged cuts all rank high. That is the profile of water that has been worked hard for a long time, and it changes what you watch for. A ledge stays where the chart put it. Steel sitting on sand is a different kind of neighbor.
| In the chart pack | Count |
|---|---|
| NOAA ENC cells | 146 |
| Charted soundings | 75,848 |
| Depth areas | 13,088 |
| Depth contours | 13,830 |
| Lateral buoys | 1,399 |
| Lateral beacons | 537 |
| Charted lights | 1,645 |
| Anchorage areas | 138 |
| Bridges | 1,306 |
| Overhead cables | 437 |
| Dredged areas | 924 |
| Charted wrecks | 1,763 |
| Charted obstructions | 3,066 |
| Underwater rocks | 589 |
| Restricted areas | 528 |
| NOAA tide prediction stations | 216 |
Counted from the Helm chart pack for New Jersey Shore, built from official NOAA electronic navigational charts. The pack downloads at about 13 MB.
Third of eighteen on wrecks, with 3,066 charted obstructions layered on top of them. Off this beach the chart is largely an inventory of things that were never meant to be down there.
What it means underway is that a clean sounding is not a statement about clean ground. Depth and obstruction are separate layers and on this coast they disagree often. Before you drop the hook, before you drag anything, and before you cut inside a mark to save a mile, the obstruction layer is the one to open. The ratio of 589 underwater rocks to 1,763 wrecks is the short version: what you snag here was built rather than formed, and its charted position is a record of where somebody found it.
It also shapes what a route explanation reads like here. When a leg runs close to charted hazards without entering them, Helm writes that into the leg's own sentence with the distance in it. On water carrying this many symbols, that sentence gets used a lot.
The dredged areas in this pack carry their own charted depths from the ENC. The median across all 924 is 10.2 meters, roughly 33 feet. The deepest is 16.8 meters, roughly 55 feet. The shallowest value in the set sits at minus 0.6 meters, which is a charted depth above datum rather than below it.
That is one label covering two completely different kinds of water. A 33 foot median is commercial channel, and it is sitting in the same pack as cuts that show nothing at all at datum. So the class label is worth very little here and the charted number is the thing to read. Helm reports that number against the draft you entered rather than shading the whole class the same blue.
Dredged water is also the water that ages fastest between surveys, which is why a route down one of these channels says out loud whether its depths came from the chart or from a survey of the channel itself.
NOAA publishes 216 tide prediction stations inside this box. The density is not padding, and the station names say why. There are separate stations called 0.8 n.mi. above entrance, 1 n.mi. above entrance, and 2.5 n.mi. above entrance. Bidwell Creek has one at the entrance and another at the Route 47 bridge. Beaverdam Creek has one at the entrance and one inside.
That is NOAA stating, in the names alone, that a creek does not have a tide. It has a tide at a place. The high water you read at Atlantic City (Ocean) runs on a different clock from the one at Absecon Channel, State Route 87 bridge, and both are different again from Artificial Island, Salem Nuclear Plant on the river side. Helm takes the station nearest to where you actually are, which with 216 of them in the box is rarely far, and labels the height with where it came from.
Atlantic Highlands, Belmar and Atlantic City (Ocean) give you the ocean side. Barnegat Inlet USCG Station, Barnegat Pier, Beach Haven Coast Guard Station and Beesleys Point give you the inside. If you time an inlet on the tide, those are two different numbers, and the inlet is where the difference between them turns into something you can feel.
Fifth of eighteen on bridges. The inside route here is a run of fixed clearances with water in between, and 437 charted overhead cables sit above it as well.
One entry in the tide station list carries the whole idea: Absecon Channel, State Route 87 bridge. It is a bridge and it is a tide station, which is both of your questions at that moment, how much water under the keel and how much air over the top, asked at the same spot. Helm reads charted vertical clearance against the air draft you entered and pulls the tide figure from the station nearest you.
There are 138 charted anchorage areas in the region, 4th of the eighteen, and 528 restricted areas. This coast is specific about where you may stop and where you may not, and both of those answers are on the chart rather than in somebody's head. Add 1,399 lateral buoys, 537 beacons, 1,645 charted lights and 10 safe-water marks, and you have water marked to the level its traffic asks for.
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.
The one nearest your position, out of the 216 NOAA prediction stations inside the New Jersey Shore box. That count is high because NOAA splits the creeks themselves. Bidwell Creek has a station at the entrance and another at the Route 47 bridge, Beaverdam Creek has one at the entrance and one inside, and several are named only by how far above an entrance they sit, such as 0.8 n.mi. above entrance and 2.5 n.mi. above entrance. Helm also labels the height with its source, so you know whether you are reading a prediction corrected by a live gauge or a published prediction on its own.
Both. The pack runs from 75.6 west to 73.8 west and from 38.8 north to 40.6 north, so the river and bay stations sit in it alongside the ocean ones. Artificial Island at the Salem Nuclear Plant, Billingsport, Auburn on Oldmans Creek, Abbots Meadow and Back Creek entrance at Nantuxent Cove are all inside the box, as are Atlantic City (Ocean), Belmar and Atlantic Highlands. The 10.2 meter median across the region's 924 dredged areas reflects water on both sides of the state, not the back bay cuts on their own.
The region carries 1,306 charted bridges, 5th of the eighteen US regions Helm builds, plus 437 overhead cables. Helm checks the charted vertical clearance against the air draft you enter, and where a bridge carries no clearance figure in the chart it reports that as unknown instead of printing a zero, so a bridge you could have cleared does not send you the long way around.
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