Just run your boat around with your sonar operating, and clever new software from Garmin, Navionics and Navico does all the work for you. It’s easy, nearly automatic and you don’t need to know anything about making a map. Happily, there is an elegant solution to potentially dangerous problems of this sort. Many waters where we use our boats have been charted poorly, or not charted at all. High-contrast and graphically exciting electronic charts look impressive and have the aura of authority, but are only as good as the data-soundings that might have been taken in 1893. If you own a sailboat or large powerboat, you may have already experienced running aground, or there is a fair chance you might in the future. If you’re an angler, you know that most of the maps out there were created with the emphasis on navigation, not fishing. Most of us have experienced situations like these, where our underwater charts either don’t have the detail we need, or they are out-of-date and inaccurate. Reality intervenes, in the form of the shallow water alarm, so you stop quickly and get the heck out of there. You are motoring near your homeport, and the chart shows you’ve got plenty of water under the keel because you’re right on the edge of the channel. How disappointing it is to find out that nobody has taken any decent soundings. What do you see? Not much detail and very little that’ll help you find the fish. You trailer your boat to a new lake, power up the chartplotter/sonar combo and look at the map that’s displayed on your crisp color screen. The third screen is a close-up of the dam (lower left in the other views) showing the steep drop-off with 1’ contours. The second chart shows their crowd-sourced Sonar Charts view. The top map is the standard Navionics Boating chart from their web app.
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