Sounds like your neighbor would be guessing too with his plotter. What good does your GPS do if you don't have a "map" of some sort to reference to? Additionally GPS itself is susceptible to gov tweaking, even down time in a particular area. Coincidentally, the latter happened in our last marina. For a week or two, you got halfway down the channel and GPS went out (there is a variety of military stuff that goes on in our area.) I had to start my plotters after we got to the main channel about a half mile away.
Even with four independent GPS antennas/receivers on board, three chart plotting devices (actually four because the two networked Furunos could be independent), and other gear, I too like having a big chart book at the helm for the reasons mentioned above. Even with two 17", one 19" screen on the Furunos, plus a 13" and a 21" on the two computers (I could also hook the laptop into the 37" TV), I like the big, always daylight visible picture of where were were in the world. On long voyages, I liked pencilling the log information on the chart every hour or so, and still enjoy going back and looking at those. Necessary? No. Nice? Well for us, yes!
However,all in all we prefer spending 95% of our time looking out at the world around us, observing, listening, even smelling. After all, that's why we're traveling by boat, isn't it?
