The Red River does not let you plan a day the way open water does. The run is cut into pools by lock and dam structures, so the question is not only how far you are going, it is which chamber you reach and at what hour. The channel is working water. A loaded tow coming up through a bend is using all of it, and that gets settled on the radio long before anybody is close enough to read a name on the wheelhouse. Over your head the crossings come steadily, and for a boat with any height on it the binding number on this river is more often up there than under the keel. Anybody who runs this water already knows that. What a chart can do is put each of those things somewhere you can see it before you are on top of it.
Helm's Red River pack covers the river between 31.02 N and 32.58 N, and from 93.78 W across to 91.66 W. Inside that box are 498 charted restricted areas, which is more than any of the fifteen US rivers Helm builds packs for. With them come 51 bridges, 24 overhead cables and 80 charted lights, along with 60 charted depth areas, 61 depth contours and 14 underwater rocks. The pack carries 15 charted lock features, counting chambers, gates and dams as separate items. Charted wrecks and charted obstructions number one each. The whole thing downloads at 2 MB.
Fourteen of the fifteen rivers have restricted areas charted in them at all. The Red River has 498, first on that list, and the figure is worth setting beside another one from the same pack. There are 60 charted depth areas. That works out to more than eight restricted areas for every charted depth area, which is an unusual shape for a chart to have. On most water the shading is telling you about the bottom. Here a large share of it is telling you where you are allowed to be.
A boundary behaves differently from a shoal. A shoal is a question of how much water is under you on the day, and you can be wrong about it by a foot and still get through. With a restricted area you are inside the line or you are outside it, and the line does not move with the season or with the stage. Four hundred and ninety eight of them are far easier to plan around than to react to, which is the whole argument for having them drawn before you leave the dock. When Helm plans a passage it treats one as something to steer clear of, and the leg explanation says so in a sentence with the distance in it.
| In the chart pack | Count |
|---|---|
| Bridges | 51 |
| Overhead cables | 24 |
| Charted lights | 80 |
| Lock features | 15 |
| Charted depth areas | 60 |
| Depth contours | 61 |
| Charted obstructions | 1 |
| Charted wrecks | 1 |
| Restricted areas | 498 |
| Underwater rocks | 14 |
Counted from the Helm chart pack for the Red River, built from the official inland electronic navigational charts published for it. The pack downloads at about 2 MB. Lock features are counted as the chart draws them, with chambers, gates and dams as separate objects.
Put the 51 bridges together with the 24 overhead cables and the pack holds 75 charted crossings over this stretch of river. Bridges outnumber cables by better than two to one, and that ratio runs in your favor. A bridge is a structure you pick up from a long way off, usually with a clearance board on the pier, and it gives you time to change your mind. A cable is a line against the sky at an angle that hides it until you are close. It has no tender, no opening schedule, and no way of knowing you are there.
If you run a flybridge, an arch, a radar mast or a sailing rig, those 75 are what decide your day here rather than anything on the sounder. Set your air draft once in Helm and the charted vertical clearance on each crossing is checked against that figure, so a crossing you cannot make is something you find out about while you are still planning. Then treat the charted number as the reference it is and read the board on the pier when you arrive. The bridge is fixed. The river under it is not.
The pack carries 15 charted lock features. That count takes chambers, gates and dams as separate items rather than counting facilities, and it puts the Red River ninth among the thirteen rivers in Helm's packs that have any charted. Russell B. Long, John H. Overton, Lindy C. Boggs and Joe D. Waggonner, Jr are among the names that appear in the chart data.
What a chamber does to a passage plan is take the arithmetic out of it. On open water, distance over speed gives you an arrival time you can more or less lean on. Here the running between one pool and the next is the easy part, and the part you cannot compute is the wait, because a tow that got there ahead of you is working through and the chamber is busy until it is not. The pools are held at their own levels, so the water you are reading in one is not the water you will be reading later in the next.
The sensible way to lay it out is pool by pool, each one its own leg, with the chamber as the end of a leg rather than something you pass through in the middle of a long run. That also puts the approach on the chart where you want it when you are coming up on one after dark, which is what the 80 charted lights in this pack are there for.
The entire pack contains a single charted wreck, last of the fifteen rivers, and a single charted obstruction, last of the twelve rivers that carry one at all. There are 14 underwater rocks, fourth among the six rivers where Helm's packs contain any rocks, and after that the inventory is more or less finished. That is a real thing to know about this river. The fixed hazard, the one drawn as a symbol and left in the same place from one season to the next, is not what you are working around on the Red.
What you are working around is traffic and a bottom that answers to the last high water. The 60 charted depth areas and 61 depth contours in the pack are the frame, and inland depth in Helm comes from state elevation surveys rather than from coastal soundings, which is what gives the router something to plan a line against away from salt water. The general account of where those numbers come from lives on the depth page, and how a route gets built from them lives on the routes page.
The area runs from 31.02 N up to 32.58 N, and from 93.78 W east to 91.66 W. Everything on this page sits inside those four numbers: the 498 restricted areas, the 51 bridges and 24 overhead cables, the 15 charted lock features, the 80 lights, and the 60 depth areas with their 61 contours.
Two megabytes is small enough that there is no reason to be selective about it. Bring it down at home or at the dock, and the chart, the planning and the navigation carry on working once the signal stops. On this river that is worth having settled before you cast off rather than discovered somewhere between chambers.
These counts describe what the chart pack carries, not the state of the river today. Charted data ages, pools change with the dams, and a lock can be out of service. Keep a lookout, listen to the traffic, and verify locally.
The pack covers the river from 31.02 N up to 32.58 N, and from 93.78 W east across to 91.66 W. Inside that box it carries 51 bridges, 24 overhead cables, 80 charted lights, 60 charted depth areas, 61 depth contours and 15 charted lock features, along with 498 restricted areas. It downloads at 2 MB, and once it is on the phone the chart and the route planning work without a signal.
The pack carries 15 charted lock features, a count that treats chambers, gates and dams as separate items rather than counting facilities, which places the Red River ninth among the thirteen rivers in Helm's packs that have any charted. Russell B. Long, John H. Overton, Lindy C. Boggs and Joe D. Waggonner, Jr are among the names that appear in the chart data, and they are drawn where they sit so you can plan a leg that ends at a chamber instead of running blind into one.
There are 51 bridges and 24 overhead cables in the pack, 75 charted crossings in all, which puts the Red River twelfth and fourteenth of the fifteen US rivers Helm packs. Set your air draft once and the charted vertical clearance on each of those 75 is checked against it while you plan. The cables are the ones to watch, because a cable carries no clearance board on a pier and gives you nothing to read as you come up on it.
Helm Boating