There is a question that catches out a surprising number of British and Dutch crews who arrive in France with a tablet full of apps and nothing on paper: are you legally carrying a chart? In French waters the answer is governed not by tradition or good sense but by an actual regulation, Division 240, and it applies to your boat the moment you enter French territorial waters, whatever flag you fly.
I learned the detail the irritating way, querying a marina office in Saint-Malo about a notice on the wall. The short version is that France does require a chart aboard, the requirement is specific, and a phone with a single navigation app open is not automatically enough to satisfy it. Here is what the rule actually says and how a visiting boat meets it without buying a chart table full of paper.
The rule in plain terms
Division 240 is the French regulation covering safety equipment on pleasure craft under 24 metres. It applies to all such boats in French waters irrespective of flag, which is the part visitors often miss. Among the carriage requirements is a navigation document, and the wording is precise: you must carry official marine charts, or extracts of them, produced from the data of a national hydrographic service, covering the area you are sailing in, kept up to date, and on either paper or an electronic device with a means of display.
Three words in that sentence do the heavy lifting. Official means a recognised hydrographic source, in practice the French SHOM, the UK Hydrographic Office, or another national service whose data feeds the chart. Covering means the charts have to actually cover where you go, not just the bit you started from. Up to date means current, which is where most casual setups fall down.
Paper or electronic, France allows both
Unlike some older national rules, Division 240 explicitly accepts an electronic chart on a device with a display. So a properly set up plotter or a tablet running official vector or raster charts can satisfy the requirement on its own. This is genuinely useful for visiting boats that have gone fully digital.
But read the wording again: official charts from a national hydrographic service, kept up to date. A free mapping app showing a generic coastline is not the same as a chart built on SHOM or UKHO survey data. The product matters. If your tablet runs charts derived from a recognised hydrographic office and you can show them on screen, you are compliant. If it runs a sketch-map with depths that came from who-knows-where, you are not, and you have also given yourself a navigation problem far worse than a paperwork one.
My own approach, and the one I would suggest to any visitor, is belt and braces: the plotter as primary, a tablet with the same official charts as backup, and a small folio of paper covering the key approaches and harbours I expect to use. The paper costs little and survives a flat battery. For how the different chart products compare for French waters, the charts for French waters piece goes deeper into SHOM versus UKHO and the app options.
Up to date is the part people fail
A chart that was current when you bought it three years ago is not current now. Buoys move, wrecks are charted, depths are resurveyed, and harbour works change approaches every season. The regulation says kept up to date, and the spirit is obvious: a chart is only a safety document if it reflects the present.
For paper, that means applying Notices to Mariners or buying a fresh edition. SHOM and the UKHO both issue corrections. For electronic charts, it means accepting the chart updates your provider pushes, which most do several times a year. A tablet running charts you downloaded in 2023 and never refreshed is arguably no more compliant than a 2023 paper chart you never corrected. The medium does not excuse you from currency.
There is a real safety reason behind the legalism. The French coast is not forgiving of stale data. The tidal range on the Brittany and Normandy coast can exceed 12 metres on a big spring, the rocks are many and the buoyage gets rearranged. A drying height that was right last year and a buoy that has since been moved 200 metres is exactly the kind of error that puts a keel on a rock at half tide.
Which areas you must cover
The requirement scales with how far offshore you go, in line with Division 240's navigation zones. The zones are defined by distance from a shelter, a shelter being a place you can reach and leave safely under your own power given the conditions. Coastal sailing inside 6 nautical miles of a shelter is the lightest zone. Semi-offshore runs from 6 to 60 nautical miles from a shelter. Offshore is beyond 60.
Whatever zone you sail, your charts have to cover it. A boat hopping along the coast needs the coastal sheets and harbour plans for the ports it will use. A boat crossing the Channel or heading out to Belle-Ile needs the passage charts too, which is one reason the crossing the English Channel by boat planning sits hand in hand with sorting your chart coverage. The test the authorities apply is simple: do your charts cover where you actually went? If the answer is no, you are non-compliant and, more to the point, you were navigating somewhere you had no proper data for.
What a check looks like
It is the Gendarmerie Maritime or the Affaires Maritimes who can stop and inspect a pleasure boat, and charts sit on the same list as lifejackets and flares. In practice a spot check at sea is uncommon for a small visiting yacht, but it happens, and the inspection is of the whole Division 240 kit, not the chart alone. If you want the fuller picture of what gets checked and the documents to keep handy, the carrying your boat documents and what the Gendarmerie Maritime checks article covers that ground.
The pragmatic reality is that a boat which can show official, current charts covering its passage, on a plotter or a tablet or paper, has nothing to worry about. The boat that gets a hard time is the one with no chart product at all, or with charts that plainly do not cover the area, because that crew has shown the inspector they were navigating blind.
Where visiting boats most often slip up
Three patterns come up again and again with crews arriving from the UK and the Low Countries. The first is the all-digital boat with a single tablet and no backup and no paper. The tablet itself may be fine, running proper UKHO or SHOM-based charts, but one device and one battery is a thin reed for both safety and the regulation's expectation that you can actually display your charts. A flat tablet at the mouth of the Morbihan, with its tidal stream running hard through a narrow entrance, is not a paperwork problem, it is an aground problem.
The second is the chart that does not cover the offshore leg. A crew buys the harbour-approach charts for the ports they plan to visit and forgets the passage chart for the water in between. The moment they leave the coastal zone, their coverage has a hole in it exactly where they are. Buy the passage charts for every leg, not just the destinations.
The third is the currency lapse: charts, paper or electronic, that were correct two or three seasons ago and have never been corrected since. This is the most common failing and the easiest to fix. Set a reminder at the start of each season to apply paper corrections and accept every electronic chart update your provider has pushed. It takes an evening and it closes the gap the regulation cares about most.
None of these gets a casual visitor into serious trouble with the authorities on a normal coastal hop. All three get a casual visitor into serious trouble with the rocks, which is the real reason the rule exists.
The takeaway for a visiting crew
Carry official charts from a recognised hydrographic service. Make sure they cover your whole intended passage, including the offshore legs. Keep them current, whether that means buying a new edition, applying corrections, or accepting the electronic updates your app offers. Electronic is fine on its own under French rules, but a paper backup of the approaches is cheap seamanship and saves you on the day the screen dies. Get those four things right and the legal requirement looks after itself, which is the way safety regulation is supposed to work.
