Agreed, I ve been on boats motor and sail where everything is lost, no power, no leccy of any sort. I ve seen laptops hard discs fail on voyage, solid state plotter displays just stop working, auto pilots that steer their own course and on one memorable voyage along the south coast in a state of the art all singing and dancing mobo with a massive array of gizmos and toys our position was plotted on the A25 near gatwick airport - but only for a mile or so then we were off Dieppe fortunatley a few minutes later the hard drive failed (by the way the charts were correctly aligned with datums its just that marine leisure equipment is basically cr*p) so MY YEOMAN SPORT TOOK OVER connected via the ciggy socket with a garmin 12XL assisted by my plastimo handbearing compass - (it was a maiden voyage so I went equiped, was it difficult no did we need a plotter?, not really; most of the time you just concentrate on keeping the UK on the right when going west along the channel but it emphasize the fallabiity of "electronics" and talk of redundancy is meaningless if the single point of failure is a component in a distant satelite).

Do I use plotters yes of course - do I trust them - get a life!