He bought a large map,
representing the sea,
without the least vestige of land.
And the crew were quite pleased,
when they found it to be,
a map they could all understand.

I’d better fill up the car with the four dollar a gallon gas before I run out and have to pay for a tow truck.

This is interesting, since it did happen during Perisher Ops. But it happened in 2002. You can read the entire report here.

The real problems that contributed to this grounding were not the tracing paper, but the failure to adequately take into account set and drift caused be excessive tides when conducting a submerged transit through a channel.

The report states the plan the students had come up with (standard procedure for Perisher Ops) was for the transit to occur at Periscope Depth, with constant position information and slow speeds. When the plan was changed to submerged, 8 kt transit, the plan was no longer adequate with regard to margin of safety.

Overall, because of their poor calculations, they failed to take into account a current of 3.4 kts, instead assuming it was 1.5 kts. The difference is huge, especially when you’re adjusting for turns in tight channels.

Regarding the tracing paper. We use it in the US Navy as well. Can it cover important information? not the stuff we use, as long as you are during more than a cursory glance at the chart, you’ll be able to see everything on the chart. In this case, the board added the comment about tracing paper because it appeared to obscure the sounding curves somewhat, and the duty CO (the student in charge at the time) was placing false faith in soundings as an indicator on when to turn the ship. The obscurity of soundings may have helped, but the real problem was the currents and not taking them into account. Soundings are just not an accurate way to fix ships position on the fly, trust me on this.

Just my thoughts.

When in open ocean plotting sheets are usually used. It has a Lat/Long grid and nothing else. You pencil in the Lat and Long. When you are a thousand miles from anything and the nearest land is 2 miles straight down, a chart is meaningless. In coastal areas, it’s a much different story. Tracing paper is a bad idea.