Sometimes at night, even with great
charts and lots of eyes, you can't really tell where you are. There's just too much background noise (cars, streetlights, water towers), the buoys get lost in the clutter, and the
GPS is busy giving numbers that aren't on the
charts.
I came up the Race (east end of LI, NY) that way once. For some reason the night was just too damned dark to see anything, the shore clutter made the marks useless, and since we were racing we weren't about to slow down and take our time plotting
GPS numbers. I wasn't totally rash--once I realized the depthsounder wasn't being obstinate. It was just saying "_ _ _" feet of water meaning "more than the 199 I can count to" and that put us firmly in the deep water channel, which was where we needed to be.
But without that extra tool, the
charts would have been useless, without a lot of time and effort to plot
GPS numbers every couple of minutes on the
charts. (Pre-computer nav that trip.)